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This paper presents two methods that we applied to our research to record infant gaze in the context of goal‐oriented actions using different eye‐tracking devices: head‐mounted and remote eye‐tracking. For each type of eye‐tracking system, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, describe the particular experimental setups we used to study infant looking and reaching, and explain how we were...
Infant eye movements are an important behavioral resource to understand early human development and learning. But the complexity and amount of gaze data recorded from state‐of‐the‐art eye‐tracking systems also pose a challenge: how does one make sense of such dense data? Toward this goal, this article describes an interactive approach based on integrating top‐down domain knowledge with bottom‐up information...
Fourteen‐month‐old infants were presented with static images of happy, neutral, and fearful emotional facial expressions in an eye‐tracking paradigm. The emotions were expressed by the infant’s own parents as well as a male and female stranger (parents of another participating infant). Rather than measuring the duration of gaze in particular areas of interest, we measured number of fixations, distribution...
Eye‐trackers suitable for use with infants are now marketed by several commercial vendors. As eye‐trackers become more prevalent in infancy research, there is the potential for users to be unaware of dangers lurking “under the hood” if they assume the eye‐tracker introduces no errors in measuring infants’ gaze. Moreover, the influx of voluminous data sets from eye‐trackers requires users to think...
Infant eye tracking is becoming increasingly popular for its presumed precision relative to traditional looking time paradigms and potential to yield new insights into developmental processes. However, there is strong reason to suspect that the temporal and spatial resolution of popular eye tracking systems is not entirely accurate, potentially compromising any data from an infant eye tracking experiment...
This paper examines the relative merits of looking time and pupil diameter measures in the study of early cognitive abilities of infants. Ten‐month‐old infants took part in a modified version of the classic drawbridge experiment used to study object permanence (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The study involved a factorial design where angle of rotation and presence or absence of an object...
The degree to which infants’ current actions are influenced by previous action is fundamental to our understanding of early social and cognitive competence. In this study, we found that infant gazing manifested notable temporal dependencies during interaction with mother even when controlling for mother behaviors. The durations of infant gazes at mother’s face were positively predicted by the durations...
Morgante et al. (in press) find inconsistencies in the time reporting of a Tobii T60XL eye tracker. Their study raises important questions about the use of the Tobii T‐series in particular, and various software and hardware in general, in different infant eye tracking paradigms. It leaves open the question of the source of the inconsistencies. Here, observations from a Tobii eye tracker are presented...
In five experiments, we tested segmentation of word forms from natural speech materials by 8‐month‐old monolingual infants who are acquiring Canadian French or Canadian English. These two languages belong to different rhythm classes; Canadian French is syllable‐timed and Canada English is stress‐timed. Findings of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 show that 8‐month‐olds acquiring either Canadian French or Canadian...
Infants and their mothers participated in a longitudinal study of the sequelae of infant goal‐blockage responses. Four‐month‐old infants participated in a standard contingency learning and goal‐blockage procedure during which anger and sad facial expressions to the blockage were coded. When infants were 12 and 20 months old, mothers completed a questionnaire about their children’s tantrums. Tantrum...
To examine key parameters of the initial conditions in early category learning, two studies compared 5‐month‐olds’ object categorization between tasks involving previously unseen novel objects, and between measures within tasks. Infants in Experiment 1 participated in a visual familiarization–novelty preference (VFNP) task with two‐dimensional (2D) stimulus images. Infants provided no evidence of...
Research suggests that nonlinguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning (VSL) as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty‐eight 8.5‐month‐old infants were presented with a three‐location spatiotemporal sequence of multicolored...
Infants search for an object hidden by an occluder in the light months later than one hidden by darkness. One explanation attributes this décalage to easier action demands in darkness versus occlusion, whereas another attributes it to easier representation demands in darkness versus occlusion. However, search tasks typically confound these two types of demands. This article presents a search task...
Recent research demonstrated that although 24‐month‐old infants do well on the initial pairing of a novel word and novel object in fast‐mapping tasks, they are unable to retain the mapping after a 5 min delay. The current study examines the role of familiarity with the objects and words on infants’ ability to bridge between the initial fast mapping of a name and object, and later retention in the...
We examined how infants’ categorization is jointly influenced by previous experience and how much they shift their gaze back and forth between stimuli. Extending previous findings reported by K. A. Kovack‐Lesh, J. S. Horst, and L. M. Oakes (2008), we found that 4‐month‐old infants’ (N =122) learning of the exclusive category of cats was related to whether they had cats at home and how much they shifted...
Infants greatly refine their ability to discriminate language sounds by 12 months, yet 14‐month‐olds appear to confuse similar‐sounding novel words. Two explanations could account for this phenomenon: infants initially have incomplete phoneme representations, suggesting developmental discontinuity; or word‐learning demands interfere with use of established phonetic detail. These hypotheses were tested...
Reduced responsiveness to joint attention (RJA), as assessed by the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS), is predictive of both subsequent language difficulties and autism diagnosis. Eye‐tracking measurement of RJA is a promising prognostic tool because it is highly precise and standardized. However, the construct validity of eye‐tracking assessments of RJA has not been established. By comparing...
Most infants with more than 6 weeks of crawling experience completely avoid the deep side of a visual cliff (Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992; Gibson & Walk, 1960). However, some experienced crawlers do move onto the transparent surface suspended several feet above the ground. An important question is whether these nonavoiders lack wariness of heights or whether they have a qualitatively...
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