Understanding embodied visual attention in child-parent interaction

Abstract

A key component of the human visual system is our attentional control - the selection of which visual stimuli to pay attention to at any moment in time. Understanding visual attention in children could yield new insight into how the visual system develops during formative years and how their visual attention and selection play a role in development and learning. We use head-mounted cameras to record first-person video from interacting children and parents, giving a good approximation of the contents of their visual fields of view, and collect gaze direction data to record where they look within the visual field. We data-mine this data to study the distributions of gaze patterns within the first-person visual frame for both children and adults. We also study the ability of visual saliency to predict visual attention, as a function of the tasks, actions, and interactions that the participants perform. We find significant differences in the results between children and parents, indicating substantial differences in how their bodily actions are coupled with their visual attention between developing (child) and developed (adult) visual systems.