Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 16;17(9):e0274113. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274113. eCollection 2022.
Though previous work has examined infant attention across a variety of tasks, less is known about the individual saccades and fixations that make up each bout of attention, and how individual differences in saccade and fixation patterns (i.e., scanning efficiency) change with development, scene content and perceptual load. To address this, infants between the ages of 5 and 11 months were assessed longitudinally (Experiment 1) and cross-sectionally (Experiment 2). Scanning efficiency (fixation duration, saccade rate, saccade amplitude, and saccade velocity) was assessed while infants viewed six quasi-naturalistic scenes that varied in content (social or non-social) and scene complexity (3, 6 or 9 people/objects). Results from Experiment 1 revealed moderate to strong stability of individual differences in saccade rate, mean fixation duration, and saccade amplitude, and both experiments revealed 5-month-old infants to make larger, faster, and more frequent saccades than older infants. Scanning efficiency was assessed as the relation between fixation duration and saccade amplitude, and results revealed 11-month-olds to have high scanning efficiency across all scenes. However, scanning efficiency also varied with scene content, such that all infants showing higher scanning efficiency when viewing social scenes, and more complex scenes. These results suggest both developmental and stimulus-dependent changes in scanning efficiency, and further highlight the use of saccade and fixation metrics as a sensitive indicator of cognitive processing.
尽管之前的研究已经考察了婴儿在各种任务中的注意力，但对于构成每个注意力回合的个体眼跳和注视，以及注视和眼跳模式（即扫描效率）如何随发展、场景内容和感知负荷而变化，我们知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，5 至 11 个月大的婴儿在纵向（实验 1）和横向（实验 2）进行了评估。在婴儿观看六个准自然场景时评估了扫描效率（注视持续时间、眼跳率、眼跳幅度和眼跳速度），这些场景在内容（社交或非社交）和场景复杂性（3、6 或 9 个人和/或物体）方面有所不同。实验 1 的结果表明，眼跳率、平均注视持续时间和眼跳幅度的个体差异具有中等至强的稳定性，两个实验都表明 5 个月大的婴儿比年长的婴儿做出更大、更快和更频繁的眼跳。扫描效率被评估为注视持续时间和眼跳幅度之间的关系，结果表明 11 个月大的婴儿在所有场景中都具有较高的扫描效率。然而，扫描效率也随场景内容而变化，例如，所有婴儿在观看社交场景和更复杂的场景时表现出更高的扫描效率。这些结果表明，扫描效率既存在发展变化，也存在刺激依赖性变化，进一步强调了使用眼跳和注视指标作为认知处理敏感指标的重要性。
