Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Young infants' eye movements over "natural" scenes and "experimental" scenes
Marc H Bornstein1, Clay Mash, Martha E Arterberry
1Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, USA. Marc_H_Bornstein@nih.gov
None:
Eye movements of 30 4-month-olds were tracked as infants viewed animals and vehicles in "natural" scenes and, for comparison, in homogeneous "experimental" scenes. Infants showed equivalent looking time preferences for natural and experimental scenes overall, but fixated natural scenes and objects in natural scenes more than experimental scenes and objects in experimental scenes and shifted fixations between objects and contexts more in natural than in experimental scenes. The findings show how infants treat objects and contexts in natural scenes and suggest that they treat more commonly used experimental scenes differently.

