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Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 2:45 pm, Skirball Theater
Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms
Do you see what I see? Mobile eye-tracking in natural environments reveals selective social-visual engagement and developing visual field biases in children and teens
Elizabeth Jiwon Im1, Kalanit Grill-Spector1; 1Stanford University
Presenter: Elizabeth Jiwon Im
Face recognition and word reading improve during childhood and adolescence alongside increasing cortical selectivity for faces and words, while selectivity for hands decreases. These developments may be linked to changes in visual diet. However, the naturalistic visual diet of children and teenagers is unknown. For the first time, we use mobile eye-tracking to compare the visual diet and gaze behavior of children (4–6 yrs) and teenagers (14–17 yrs) in home and classroom environments. We find that the prevalence of social-visual information in children's and teenagers' visual diet does not always predict how they engage with that information. Moreover, different contexts lead to different visual statistics and gaze behaviors, even within the same age group. We also find that visual-field biases continue to develop from childhood into adolescence. Together, our findings suggest that children and teenagers sample the world differently, with context shaping gaze behavior across development, suggesting that models of visual development should incorporate not only scene statistics but also age- and context-dependent fixation statistics.
Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations