Developmental changes in infants' and children's attention to faces and salient regions vary across and within video...

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a global shift over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether this shift is truly global, that is, consistent across and within stimuli despite variations in content. To test the global shift hypothesis, we recorded eye movements of 89 children (6 months to 10 years) and adults while they viewed 7 video clips. We measured the extent to which each participant attended to faces and to salient areas for each video. There was no evidence of global age-related changes in attention: Neither feature showed consistent increases or decreases with age. Moreover, windowed analyses within each stimulus video revealed significant moment-to-moment variations in the relation between age and each visual feature (via a bootstrapping analysis). For some time windows, adults looked more often at both feature types compared to infants and children. However, for other time windows, the pattern was reversed-younger participants looked more at faces and salient locations. Lack of consistent directional effects provides strong evidence against the global shift hypothesis. We suggest an alternative explanation: Over development, observers increasingly prioritize when and where to look by learning to track which features are relevant within a scene. Implications for the development of visual attention and children's understanding of screen-based media are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).