Measuring the development of social attention using free-viewing

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal-directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers between 3 and 30 months old. We found systematic developmental changes in what children looked at. When viewing faces alone, younger children looked more at eyes and older children more at mouths, especially when the faces were making expressions or talking. In the more complex videos, older children looked more at hands than younger children, especially when the hands were performing actions. Our results suggest that as children develop they become better able to direct their attention to the parts of complex scenes that are most interesting socially.

幼儿在自然环境中如何将注意力投向他人？尽管已有大量研究探讨面部感知与目标导向行为，但针对幼儿在复杂且无约束观看环境中的注视对象的研究相对较少。为解答这一问题，我们向3至30个月大的大量婴幼儿样本展示了包含物体、面部、儿童玩玩具及复杂社交场景的视频。研究发现，幼儿的注视对象存在系统性的发展变化。单独观看面部时，年龄较小的幼儿更多注视眼睛，而年龄较大的幼儿更多注视嘴巴——尤其是在面部做出表情或说话时。在更复杂的视频中，年龄较大的幼儿比年龄较小的幼儿更多注视手部，尤其是在手执行动作时。研究结果表明，随着幼儿的发展，他们越来越能够将注意力投向复杂场景中社交相关性最强的部分。