Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 23, 2025
Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Head and eyes: Looking behavior in 12- to 24-month-old infants
Jeremy I Borjon1,2, Drew H Abney3,4, Chen Yu1,5,6
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Insights
Infants aged 12-24 months coordinate head and eye movements for active vision during object play. This fundamental visual process remains consistent despite rapid motor development in early childhood.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Infant vision research
Background:
- Active vision involves coordinated head and eye movements.
- Understanding infant visual development is crucial for cognitive science.
- Previous research often studied vision in static conditions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the foundational processes of active vision in infants.
- To examine the coordination between head and eye movements during object play in 12- to 24-month-old infants.
- To determine if this coordination is developmentally invariant during this period.
Main Methods:
- Utilized head-mounted eye-tracking technology.
- Employed motion capture systems.
- Observed infants aged 12 to 24 months during object play.
Main Results:
- Looks to objects were tightly linked and synchronous with a stilled head.
- This head-eye coordination was consistent regardless of gaze duration.
- The dynamic coordination was developmentally invariant across the 12- to 24-month age range.
Conclusions:
- Aligned head and eye movements represent a fundamental property of human vision.
- Studying visual behavior in freely moving infants is essential.
- This research opens new avenues for understanding body movement's role in visual attention development.
Abstract:
This study demonstrates evidence for a foundational process underlying active vision in older infants during object play. Using head-mounted eye-tracking and motion capture, looks to an object are shown to be tightly linked to and synchronous with a stilled head, regardless of the duration of gaze, for infants 12 to 24 months of age. Despite being a developmental period of rapid and marked changes in motor abilities, the dynamic coordination of head stabilization and sustained gaze to a visual target is developmentally invariant during the examined age range. The findings indicate that looking with an aligned head and eyes is a fundamental property of human vision and highlights the importance of studying looking behavior in freely moving perceivers in everyday contexts, opening new questions about the role of body movement in both typical and atypical development of visual attention.
