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Updated: Aug 31, 2025

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

Published on: November 14, 2018

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Physiological arousal explains infant gaze following in various social contexts

Mitsuhiko Ishikawa1,2, Atsushi Senju2,3, Masaharu Kato1

  • 1Centre for Baby Science, Doshisha University, 4-1-1 Kizugawadai, Kizugawa, Kyoto 619-0295, Japan.

Royal Society Open Science
|August 22, 2022
PubMed

Insights

Infant gaze following (GF) is influenced by social cues. Increased physiological arousal, measured by heart rate (HR), mediates how infants respond to reliable faces and eye contact, impacting their GF frequency.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Human Sociocognitive Development

Background:

  • Gaze following (GF) is crucial for infant language and cultural acquisition.
  • Infant GF is adaptively modulated by social context, not merely reflexive.
  • Neurophysiological mechanisms of contextual GF modulation require further exploration.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if infant heart rate (HR), indicating physiological arousal, mediates contextual modulation of gaze following (GF).
  • To examine how social cues like face reliability and eye contact influence infant HR and subsequent GF.

Main Methods:

  • Forty-one 6- to 9-month-old infants observed reliable or unreliable faces.
  • Infants viewed videos with or without eye contact before a gaze-directing event.
  • Infant heart rate (HR) was monitored throughout the experiment.

Main Results:

  • Both face reliability and eye contact independently increased infant heart rate (HR).
  • Increased HR fully mediated the impact of these social cues on GF frequency.
  • Each social cue enhanced physiological arousal, cumulatively predicting GF likelihood.

Conclusions:

  • Infant gaze following is modulated by physiological arousal in response to social cues.
  • Heart rate serves as a key mediator in how infants process social information for gaze following.
  • Findings highlight the interplay between arousal and social cue processing in early development.

Keywords:
eye contactgaze followingheart ratereliabilitysocial decision-making

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