Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 3, 2025
Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Infants' anticipatory eye movements: feature-based attention guides infants' visual attention
Shuma Tsurumi1,2,3, So Kanazawa4, Masami K Yamaguchi5
1Department of Psychology, Chuo University, 742-1 Higashi-Nakano, Hachioji, Tokyo, 192-0393, Japan. stsurumi@let.hokudai.ac.jp.
Insights
Preverbal infants aged 7-8 months can use feature-based attention to focus on specific object features. This demonstrates early attentional selection abilities in infants, crucial for cognitive development.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Feature-based attention allows selective focus on object characteristics.
- While present in children, feature-based attention in preverbal infants is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if preverbal infants (7-8 months) can utilize feature-based attention.
- To determine if infants can direct attention endogenously based on learned features like color or orientation.
Main Methods:
- Developed a novel anticipation-looking task for 60 preverbal infants aged 7-8 months.
- Infants learned to associate a feature (color or orientation) with a target.
- Experiment 2 used novel objects to confirm feature-based attention independent of object recognition.
Main Results:
- Preverbal infants demonstrated the ability to direct attention endogenously to a specific feature.
- Infants successfully selected target features amidst irrelevant ones, indicating feature-based attentional selection.
- Attention was guided by familiarized features (color, orientation) even with novel objects.
Conclusions:
- Preverbal infants aged 7-8 months possess feature-based attentional selection capabilities.
- Infants can form anticipations and direct attention based on learned visual features.
- This study provides foundational evidence for early attentional mechanisms in human development.
Abstract:
When looking for an object, we identify it by selectively focusing our attention to a specific feature, known as feature-based attention. This basic attentional system has been reported in young children; however, little is known of whether infants could use feature-based attention. We have introduced a newly developed anticipation-looking task, where infants learned to direct their attention endogenously to a specific feature based on the learned feature (color or orientation), in 60 preverbal infants aged 7-8 months. We found that preverbal infants aged 7-8 months can direct their attention endogenously to the specific target feature among irrelevant features, thus showing the feature-based attentional selection. Experiment 2 bolstered this finding by demonstrating that infants directed their attention depending on the familiarized feature that belongs to a never-experienced object. These results that infants can form anticipation by color and orientation reflect they could drive their attention through feature-based selection.
