3-008 - Look into the Real World: Implementing Eye-tracking Technologies to Study Gaze Behaviors in Naturalistic Settings

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

From early infancy, visual attention has both moment-to-moment and long-term effects on motor behavior, learning, and social interaction. Most previous work uses computer-based stimuli presentation. However, examining gaze behaviors toward natural stimuli in real-life contexts provides the added elements of active visual selection and/or real-time social interaction. This new information may yield more nuanced attention patterns, thus allowing us to study how looking behaviors may actively influence development. This symposium will highlight mobile (ambulatory) eye-tracking as a powerful tool for examining gaze behaviors in the context of typical and atypical development across a variety of domains, including social interaction, language learning, and locomotor exploration. We will also illustrate how stationary eye-tracking paradigms, which allow for greater experimental control, provide a useful compliment to mobile eye-tracking methods. The first speaker will show how a stationary eye-tracking paradigm that enables live interactions between infants and their caregivers can reveal different patterns of attention and social smiling towards the caregivers in children at varying risk for developmental delay. The second presentation compares patterns of attention toward screen-based and interactive social stimuli using a within-subject design. The third presentation uses infant mobile eye-tracking to provide surprising insights into the relations between infants' fixations and locomotor exploration. Finally, our last presentation investigates the role of joint and sustained attention during infant-parent interactions in predicting vocabulary development in infancy. These studies represent emerging efforts at studying a range of developing functions in real-time and in “real-life”, using fine-grained analyses of visual attention.

Sub Unit

• Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Chair

• Xiaoxue Fu, The Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Attunement to Social Contingencies in Infants with and without ASD during Mother-infant Face-to-face Interactions - Presenting Author: Sarah Shultz, Emory University; Isabella Stallworthy, Emory University; Sarah Glazer, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center; Rachel Sandercock, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Peter Lewis, Emory University; Ami Klin, Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine; Warren Jones, Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine

• Using Mobile Eye-tracking Measures of Attention to Examine Contexts that Evoke Social Wariness and Peer Cooperation - Presenting Author: Xiaoxue Fu, The Pennsylvania State University; Phillip Galinsky, Pennsylvania State University; Koraly Perez-Edgar, The Pennsylvania State University

• Why Do Infants Move? Locomotor Exploration Is More Random Than Destination Directed - Presenting Author: Justine Hoch, New York University; Jennifer Rachwani, New York University; Karen E. Adolph, New York University, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience

• Infant Attention, not Joint Attention, Predicts Vocabulary Development - Presenting Author: Chen Yu, Indiana University; Sumarga Suanda, Indiana University / Psychological & Brain Sciences; Linda Smith, Indiana University