So grateful to have collaborated with @briannakhunter.bsky.social, @johnkiat.bsky.social, Christian Nelson, Steve Luck, and @lisaoakes.bsky.social on this one.

More to come on how infants learn to navigate the complexity of the visual world!

#infantcognition #development #visualperception

3) Importantly, the influence of orientation was modulated by visual clutter—it had stronger predictive power in less cluttered scenes.

These findings suggest that while infants’ attention is still influenced by low-level salience, not all features are equal—and their use evolves with development.

1) Infants’ fixations were strongly predicted by orientation, and this effect grew with age.

2) Color and intensity did not reliably predict gaze overall, though color was slightly predicting the fixation locations of the youngest infants.

We examined how 4-12-month-olds allocate attention while viewing scenes, using the Graph-Based Visual Salience (GBVS) model to break salience into its component features: orientation, color, and intensity. Across two experiments with over 160 infants, we found that:

I just saw this, I guess need to turn my Bluesky notifications on! 😅 Thank you so much for having me. It was great to share my work with you all and get your insight! Absolutely wonderful to meet you all and these are such kind words!

Special thanks to @lisaoakes.bsky.social, Taylor Hayes, Katie Pomaranski, and John Henderson for making this work possible!

doi.org/10.1111/infa...

Older infants looked more at meaningful regions, aligning with prior research predicting a shift from relying on stimulus-driven factors to higher-level cognitive processes. This transition contributes to a more adult-like gaze behavior over the first year of life.

We found that infants preferentially fixated regions high in local meaning, physical salience, and closer the the center of the screen. 

Interestingly, meaning had a greater impact on infants' fixations than saliency, similar to findings in adults during natural scene viewing.

We wanted to know whether infants look to regions high in meaning but, just as importantly, whether they avoid regions with low meaning. To investigate, we compared infants' fixated locations to simulated non-fixated locations in terms of meaning, saliency, and center proximity.

We examined the influence of local meaning on the gaze patterns of infants aged 4-12 months towards naturalistic scenes, using meaning maps developed by John Henderson and Taylor Hayes. Our analysis controlled for physical salience and center bias.