What have we learned about infant visual attention in the first 25 years of the 21st century?

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the primary view of infant visual attention development focused on a transition across the first postnatal year from being stimulus-driven to goal-driven, reflecting a broader shift from subcortical to cortical control. This perspective was supported by decades of infant looking-time studies. However, our understanding of infant attention has significantly evolved over the past 25 years, shaped by both theoretical advancements and new technological and methodological tools. Researchers now understand that attention development reflects multiple interacting systems that have cascading effects across time. The availability of infant-suitable eye-tracking methods have allowed researchers to consider multiple aspects of attention by precisely measuring when and where infants look, emerging quantitative models of stimulus saliency and computational models of the visual system have deepened our understanding of bottom-up and top-down influences on infant attention, and new methods to evaluate infants’ egocentric views have allowed researchers to measure attention in naturalistic contexts. Thus, these innovations allowed us to address questions that were unthinkable 25 years ago. Here, we discuss how these advances have transformed our understanding of infant attention development and outline key directions for future research, paving the way for even more exciting discoveries in the next 25 years.