Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 12, 2025
Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Remote, tablet-based assessment of gaze following: a nationwide infant twin study
Frederick Shic1,2, Kelsey Jackson Dommer1, Jessica Benton1
1Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development, Seattle Children's Research Institute, Seattle, WA, United States.
Introduction:
Much of our understanding of infant psychological development relies on an in-person, laboratory-based assessment. This limits research generalizability, scalability, and equity in access. One solution is the development of new, remotely deployed assessment tools that do not require real-time experimenter supervision.
Methods:
The current nationwide (Sweden) infant twin study assessed participants remotely via their caregiver's tablets (N = 104, ages 3 to 17 months). To anchor our findings in previous research, we used a gaze-following task where experimental and age effects are well established.
Results:
Closely mimicking results from conventional eye tracking, we found that a full head movement elicited more gaze following than isolated eye movements. Furthermore, predictably, we found that older infants followed gaze more frequently than younger infants. Finally, while we found no indication of genetic contributions to gaze-following accuracy, the latency to disengage from the gaze cue and orient toward a target was significantly more similar in monozygotic twins than in dizygotic twins, an indicative of heritability.
Discussion:
Together, these results highlight the potential of remote assessment of infants' psychological development, which can improve generalizability, inclusion, and scalability in developmental research.
