Development of infants' attention to faces during the first year

Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 26, 2026

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
07:09

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Published on: November 14, 2018

Michael C Frank1, Edward Vul, Scott P Johnson

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 46-3037D, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. mcfrank@mit.edu

Cognition
|December 31, 2008
PubMed

Insights

Infants gradually shift attention to faces in complex scenes between 3 and 9 months. Early attention relies on image features, later focusing on faces, indicating developmental changes in visual processing.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Visual attention

Background:

  • Newborns show innate preference for faces.
  • Development of face attention in complex naturalistic scenes is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate the developmental trajectory of infant attention to faces.
  • Examine how attention shifts from low-level image features to faces in complex scenes.

Main Methods:

  • Eye-tracking methodology was used to record infant and adult gaze patterns.
  • Participants viewed clips from "A Charlie Brown Christmas" during free-viewing.
  • Novel computational tools analyzed fixation consistency and predictors.

Main Results:

  • Face-looking tendency increased with age from 3 to 9 months.
  • 3-month-olds showed less consistent attention and were driven by image salience.
  • Attention gradually shifted towards faces between 3 and 9 months.

Conclusions:

  • Infant attention to faces develops significantly between 3 and 9 months.
  • Early visual attention is guided by low-level features, maturing to prioritize faces.
  • This developmental shift has implications for social development and attentional control.

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