title: Empty-headed dynamical model of infant visual foraging.
abstract: Visual foraging is one important way that very young infants explore and learn about their environment. We recently showed that a simple stochastic dynamical model acts quantitatively like free-looking 1-month-old infants, even though it does not include any components that directly represent the perceptual-cognitive processes that operate on the input from visual foraging. This suggested that early in development, generic low-level processes like noise and hysteresis in the mechanisms controlling gaze may drive visual foraging behavior and therefore regulate the input to higher-level perceptual-cognitive processes that later come to have more influence on free looking. Here we evaluate the model's ability to behave like 3-month-olds studied under the same experimental conditions as 1-month-olds. The results show that the empty-headed model can also behave like 3-month-old infants, although not as well as 1-month-olds. Its partial success at 3 months suggests that generic low-level processes controlling gaze remain important in visual foraging. Its pattern of failure suggests that by 3 months time-dependent processes like attention have become especially important.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853. ssr4@cornell.edu.
authors.forename: Steven S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Robertson
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: dynamical; hysteresis; infant; looking; model; stochastic; visual foraging