Brianna K. Hunter¹, Shannon M. Klotz¹, Steven J. Luck¹, Lisa M. Oakes¹; ¹University of California, Davis

The ways in which infants visually explore their environment have cascading influences on what they can learn (Oakes, 2023). Therefore, understanding patterns of infants’ visual exploration is necessary to understand how they interact with and process the world around them. Visual exploration may vary across development; infants and children initially engage with the world broadly but increasingly use top-down control to focus on more limited information with age (Blanco & Sloutsky, 2024). Additionally, infants’ visual exploration may vary within-infants as they adapt their looking behaviors based on the amount of information available for learning (Kidd et al., 2012). In the present study, we analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamics of 100,742 fixations made by 382 4- to 12-month-old infants viewing 243 different naturalistic scenes. We found that across a given trial, fixations progressively shifted outward from the center of the image (p< .001). However, this effect was moderated by the overall visual clutter in the image (p= .041). Early fixations during scenes with high levels of visual clutter, indexed via subband entropy (Rosenholtz, 2007), were closer to the center of the image compared to early fixations during trials with less clutter. This suggests that infants constrict early visual exploration under circumstances with high levels of perceptual competition. Moreover, the extent of infants’ overall exploratory looking, measured as scan path distance—the summed distances between all fixations—varied as a function of both the visual clutter of the scenes and the age of the infants (p< .001). Whereas younger infants’ showed similar scan path distances regardless of visual clutter, older infants reduced their exploratory looking on scenes with high visual clutter. These results indicate that infants’ visual exploration varies with the visual context: in highly cluttered scenes, early exploration is limited to the central visual field and overall exploration is reduced, particularly among older infants.

Acknowledgements: We greatly appreciate the students and staff in the Infant Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, for their help with data collection and discussions of this work. This research and preparation of this work was made possible by NIH grants 1F32EY034017 and R01EY030127.