An eye tracking investigation of developmental change in bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes.
This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was also the winner-take-all salient area in the display as determined by the MATLAB SaliencyToolbox. In the other half, a random location was the winner-take-all salient area in the display and the face was visually non-salient. We found that proportion of attended faces, in the first second of scene viewing, improved after the first year. Visually salient faces attracted bottom-up attention orienting more than non-salient faces reliably and robustly only after infancy. Preliminary data indicate that this shift to use of visual salience to guide bottom-up attention orienting after infancy may be a function of stabilization of visual skills. Moreover, sociodemographic factors including number of siblings in the home and family income were agents of developmental change in orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes in infancy.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America.
Dima
D
Amso
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America.
Sara
S
Haas
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America.
Julie
J
Markant
D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult