Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 4, 2026
A Method to Quantify Visual Information Processing in Children Using Eye Tracking
Published on: July 9, 2016
A new system for quantitative evaluation of infant gaze capabilities in a wide visual field
Andrea Pratesi1, Francesca Cecchi2, Elena Beani3,4
1The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Viale Rinaldo Piaggio 34, 56025, Pontedera, Pisa, Italy. a.pratesi@sssup.it.
Insights
This study introduces CareToy C, a novel system for measuring infant gaze in a wide visual field. It offers quantitative data to enhance clinical assessments of infant visual capabilities.
Area of Science:
- Ophthalmology
- Developmental Psychology
- Biomedical Engineering
Background:
- Infant visual assessment is challenging due to limitations of adult-based techniques.
- Current eye-tracking methods require infant collaboration, limiting research applications.
- A need exists for a new tool to measure infant gaze in a wide visual field for clinical practice.
Purpose of the Study:
- To design, develop, and test a new system, CareToy C, for measuring infant gaze in a wide visual field.
- To address the limitations of existing methods in infant visual assessment.
- To provide a tool transferable to clinical settings for evaluating common visual competences.
Main Methods:
- The system integrates a commercial eye tracker (SmartEye) with six cameras (60 Hz).
- A mechanical structure with five speakers and five screens was designed for visual and auditory stimulation at a 60 cm distance.
- Tasks were designed to assess infant gaze movements under various conditions, including gap, overlap, and audio-visual paradigms.
Main Results:
- A system was developed to measure infant gaze across a wide visual field (±60°), with intermediate evaluation at ±30°.
- Integrated software enabled diverse visual paradigms (gap, overlap, audio-visual) for assessing visual and multisensory sub-competencies.
- The system innovatively integrates a commercial eye-tracker into a specialized setup.
Conclusions:
- The CareToy C system is suitable for measuring and evaluating infant gaze capabilities in a wide visual field.
- It provides quantitative data to enhance the clinical assessment of infants.
- The system offers a novel approach to infant visual competence evaluation.
Background:
The visual assessment of infants poses specific challenges: many techniques that are used on adults are based on the patient's response, and are not suitable for infants. Significant advances in the eye-tracking have made this assessment of infant visual capabilities easier, however, eye-tracking still requires the subject's collaboration, in most cases and thus limiting the application in infant research. Moreover, there is a lack of transferability to clinical practice, and thus it emerges the need for a new tool to measure the paradigms and explore the most common visual competences in a wide visual field. This work presents the design, development and preliminary testing of a new system for measuring infant's gaze in the wide visual field called CareToy C: CareToy for Clinics.
Methods:
The system is based on a commercial eye tracker (SmartEye) with six cameras running at 60 Hz, suitable for measuring an infant's gaze. In order to stimulate the infant visually and audibly, a mechanical structure has been designed to support five speakers and five screens at a specific distance (60 cm) and angle: one in the centre, two on the right-hand side and two on the left (at 30° and 60° respectively). Different tasks have been designed in order to evaluate the system capability to assess the infant's gaze movements during different conditions (such as gap, overlap or audio-visual paradigms). Nine healthy infants aged 4-10 months were assessed as they performed the visual tasks at random.
Results:
We developed a system able to measure infant's gaze in a wide visual field covering a total visual range of ±60° from the centre with an intermediate evaluation at ±30°. Moreover, the same system, thanks to different integrated software, was able to provide different visual paradigms (as gap, overlap and audio-visual) assessing and comparing different visual and multisensory sub-competencies. The proposed system endowed the integration of a commercial eye-tracker into a purposive setup in a smart and innovative way.
Conclusions:
The proposed system is suitable for measuring and evaluating infant's gaze capabilities in a wide visual field, in order to provide quantitative data that can enrich the clinical assessment.
