Age differences in orienting to faces in dynamic scenes depend on face centering, not visual saliency

The role of local meaning in infants' fixations of natural scenes

As infants view visual scenes every day, they must shift their eye gaze and visual attention from location to location, sampling information to process and learn. Like adults, infants' gaze when viewing natural scenes (i.e., photographs of everyday scenes) is influenced by the physical features of the scene image and a general bias to look more centrally in a scene. However, it is unknown how infants' gaze while viewing such scenes is influenced by the semantic content of the scenes. Here, we tested the relative influence of local meaning, controlling for physical salience and center bias, on the eye gaze of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 92) as they viewed natural scenes. Overall, infants were more likely to fixate scene regions rated as higher in meaning, indicating that, like adults, the semantic content, or local meaning, of scenes influences where they look. More importantly, the effect of meaning on infant attention increased with age, providing the first evidence for an age-related increase in the impact of local meaning on infants' eye movements while viewing natural scenes.

The effect of narrative coherence and visual salience on children's and adults' gaze while watching video

Low-level visual features (e.g., motion, contrast) predict eye gaze during video viewing. The current study investigated the effect of narrative coherence on the extent to which low-level visual salience predicts eye gaze. Eye movements were recorded as 4-year-olds (n = 20) and adults (n = 20) watched a cohesive versus random sequence of video shots from a 4.5-min full vignette from Sesame Street. Overall, visual salience was a stronger predictor of gaze in adults than in children, especially when viewing a random shot sequence. The impact of narrative coherence on children's gaze was limited to the short period of time surrounding cuts to new video shots. The discussion considers potential direct effects of visual salience as well as incidental effects due to overlap between salient features and semantic content. The findings are also discussed in the context of developing video comprehension.