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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 14, 2025

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

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

Published on: November 14, 2018

Faces Attract Infants' Attention in Complex Displays.

Teodora Gliga¹, Mayada Elsabbagh¹, Athina Andravizou¹

¹Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

|July 23, 2020

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Six-month-old infants are drawn to faces in complex scenes, showing faces grab attention. However, detailed scanning reveals a preference for upright faces, distinguishing attention-grabbing from attention-holding.

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Area of Science:

Developmental psychology
Cognitive neuroscience
Infant visual perception

Background:

Infant face preference research typically uses simple displays.
Understanding early visual attention to faces in complex environments is crucial for developmental studies.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate 6-month-old infants' attention to faces within a complex visual array.
To determine if faces possess an inherent attention-grabbing property.
To explore factors influencing face-related visual attention, such as orientation and internal features.

Main Methods:

Presenting 6-month-old infants with visual arrays containing faces among other objects.
Measuring initial saccade direction (first look) towards faces.
Analyzing fixation counts to assess detailed visual scanning patterns.
Comparing responses to upright, inverted, and phase-scrambled faces.

Main Results:

Infants preferentially directed their first saccade towards faces, even when competing objects were present.
This initial attention-grabbing effect was observed for both upright and inverted faces.
Faces with phase-scrambled interiors failed to attract initial attention.
Upright faces were scanned more extensively than inverted or phase-scrambled faces, indicating a difference in sustained attention.

Conclusions:

Faces possess a general mechanism for attracting infant attention in complex scenes.
Internal facial features are necessary for this attention-grabbing effect.
Orientation-specific processing (preference for upright faces) emerges during more sustained visual engagement.
A distinction exists between attention-grabbing and attention-holding mechanisms in infant face perception.