Selective Attention in Early Word Learning: An Eye-Tracking Study on Viewing Naturalistic Egocentric Scenes

To learn a word from an everyday context, infants need to be able to link the heard word with the correct object perceived. A prevailing view of the early learning environment is that infants' world is bombarded with objects and words. Therefore, it is difficult to find the named object from many possible candidates. However, building correct word-referent mappings relies on in-moment visual selection, it is not clear what infants attend to when learning words in a naturalistic context. Toward this goal, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment in which 12-month-old infants were presented with complex visual scenes extracted from infants' egocentric videos recorded during naturalistic parent-child toy play. These scenes were selected at naming moments when parents labeled a toy object during free-flowing play. We selected visual scenes from a mix of more or less ambiguous naming events that contained different visual properties of the named objects and measured infants' real-time object-looking behaviors. We found that, despite the different visual properties of infants' egocentric scenes, early visual attention is both selective and variable. Selective visual attention is highly constrained by the visual saliency of the learning scenes, but not influenced by labels or existing word knowledge. Infants are more likely to attend to the named object when it is salient in the egocentric view. Our results suggest that although infants' naturalistic learning environment appears to be messy in terms of the number of possible objects for a heard object name, their selective attention significantly reduces the in-moment uncertainty associated with object name learning.