title: "Are you looking at me?" How children's gaze judgments improve with age.
abstract: Adults' judgments of another person's gaze reflect both sensory (e.g., perceptual) and nonsensory (e.g., decisional) processes. We examined how children's performance on a gaze categorization task develops over time by varying uncertainty in the stimulus presented to 6- to 11- year-olds (n = 57). We found that younger children responded "direct" over a wider range of gaze deviations. We also found that increasing uncertainty led to an increase in direct responses, across all age groups. A simple model to account for these data revealed that although younger children had a noisier sensory representation of the stimulus, most developmental changes in gaze were because of a change in children's response criteria (category boundaries). These results suggest that although the core mechanisms for gaze processing are already in place by the age of 6, their development continues across the whole of childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London.
authors: Isabelle
authors: I
authors: Mareschal
authors: Department of Psychology, UNSW Australia.
authors: Yumiko
authors: Y
authors: Otsuka
authors: Department of Psychology, UNSW Australia.
authors: Colin W G
authors: CW
authors: Clifford
authors: Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Department of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London.
authors: Denis
authors: D
authors: Mareschal
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation