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

We report a secondary analysis of Kadooka and Franchak (2020), in which observers’ eye movements were recorded during viewing of television cli ps containing a variety of faces. For every face on every video frame, we calculated its visual saliency (based on both static and dynamic image features) and calculated how close the face was to the center of the image. Results revealed that participants of every age looked more often at each face when it was more salient compared to less salient. In contrast, centering did not increase the likelihood that infants looked at a given face, but in later childhood and adulthood, centering became a stronger cue for face looking. A control analysis determined that the age-related change in centerin g was specific to face looking; participants of all ages were more likely to look at the center of the image, and this center bias did not change with age. The implications for using videos in educational and diagnostic contexts are discussed.
Source: Infancy - Category: Child Development Authors: Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research