Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 14, 2025
Comparing Eye-tracking Data of Children with High-functioning ASD, Comorbid ADHD, and of a Control Watching Social Videos
Published on: December 7, 2018
Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free-Viewing
Michael C Frank1, Edward Vul2, Rebecca Saxe3
1Department of Psychology Stanford University.
Insights
Young children
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Cognitive science
- Human behavior
Background:
- Limited research exists on how infants and toddlers direct attention in complex, naturalistic environments.
- Existing studies often focus on isolated stimuli like faces or actions, not integrated social scenes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate developmental changes in visual attention in young children (3–30 months).
- To identify specific visual focus shifts in response to faces, actions, and complex social interactions.
Main Methods:
- A large sample of infants and toddlers viewed videos depicting objects, faces, children playing, and social scenes.
- Eye-tracking or similar methods were likely used to record visual attention patterns.
Main Results:
- Younger children focused more on eyes, while older children shifted attention to mouths, especially during vocalizations or expressions.
- Attention to hands, particularly during actions, increased with age in complex scenes.
Conclusions:
- Children's visual attention strategies evolve significantly during infancy and toddlerhood.
- Development enhances the ability to selectively attend to socially relevant information in complex environments.
Abstract:
How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal-directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers between 3 and 30 months old. We found systematic developmental changes in what children looked at. When viewing faces alone, younger children looked more at eyes and older children more at mouths, especially when the faces were making expressions or talking. In the more complex videos, older children looked more at hands than younger children, especially when the hands were performing actions. Our results suggest that as children develop they become better able to direct their attention to the parts of complex scenes that are most interesting socially.
