- Author
- Title
- Looking (for) patterns
- Subtitle
- Real-world scene viewing in infants and adults
- Supervisors
- Award date
- 8 May 2020
- Number of pages
- 238
- Document type
- PhD thesis
- Faculty
- Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG)
- Institute
- Psychology Research Institute (PsyRes)
- Abstract
-
This thesis describes the looking patterns (measured using eye-tracking) of infants (3 – 20-month-olds) and adults while looking at real-world scenes displayed on a computer monitor. These looking patterns are typically explained by either, salience (e.g., color, edges and contrast) or by the meaningfulness of objects and context within a scene. This led to the general hypothesis that infants’ eye-movements would be more driven by salience, whereas adults eye-movements would be driven more by meaning. To compare infants and adults an analytic pre-processing routine was developed that was able to apply an equivalent procedure to the (noisier) infant and (cleaner) adult eye-tracker data (Chapter 2). Chapters 3 and 4 show that the horizontal and central biases in saccades, known to be present in adults are also present in infants. Chapter 5 shows the high degree to which dependencies within looking patterns are similar across infants and adults. In chapter 6, age-dependent differences in viewing behavior are modelled, showing that between 3 and 15 months babies show more and more adult-like viewing behavior. Chapters 7 and 8 show that objects in scenes play a crucial role in driving the eye-movements of both infants and adults. Overall this thesis shows that infants’ and adults’ looking patterns are remarkably similar in many respects. This led to the general conclusion that meaning of real-world scenes is less important than is often assumed and that human free-viewing patterns are to a large extent, but not fully driven by basic mechanisms that are already present in infants.
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/f230f0be-32ee-4d9f-b519-d08b4e08e91d
- Downloads
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