Children's search for targets located within and beyond the field of view: effects of deafness and age
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 25, 2026
Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
Published on: May 15, 2019
J Bernard Netelenbos1, Geert J P Savelsbergh
1Faculty of Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 9, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. J_B_Netelenbos@fbw.vu.nl
Insights
Deaf children, especially younger ones, exhibit distinct eye-head movement coordination and slower visual target localization compared to hearing children. These developmental differences in visual search diminish with age.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Neuroscience
- Audiology
Background:
- Visual search strategies and eye-head coordination are crucial for target localization.
- Understanding developmental differences in visual processing between deaf and hearing children is important.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine visual target localization and eye-head movement timing in deaf and hearing children.
- To investigate age-related changes (5-7 vs. 10-12 years) in these processes.
Main Methods:
- Assessed localization time of visual targets.
- Analyzed relative timing of eye and head movement onsets.
- Compared deaf and hearing children across two age groups.
Main Results:
- Deaf children more frequently used a head-first eye-head coordination strategy.
- The onset discrepancy between eye and head movements was larger in younger children.
- Deaf children, particularly the young, showed longer target localization times than hearing peers.
Conclusions:
- Developmental differences in visual search between deaf and hearing children decrease over time.
- Findings suggest distinct developmental trajectories in representational and sensorimotor control of eye-head responses in deaf individuals.
Abstract:
The localisation time of visual targets within and beyond the field of view and the relative timing of the onsets of eye and head movements were examined in deaf and hearing children of two age groups: 5-7 years and 10-12 years. Compared to their hearing peers, the deaf children showed more often a mode of eye-head coordination in which the head leads the eye. The discrepancy between the onsets of eye and head movements were greater for the younger than for the older groups. Furthermore, the deaf children took more time than the hearing children to localise the targets; especially the young deaf differed from their hearing contemporaries. These findings support the view that during development the differences in visual search between deaf and hearing children decrease. The results are discussed in the context of a distinction between representational and sensorimotor control of eye-head responses.
