Developmental Changes in Natural Scene Viewing in Infancy

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as they viewed images selected from the MIT Saliency Benchmark Project. In general, across this age range infants' fixation distributions became more consistent and more adult-like, suggesting that infants' fixations in natural scenes become increasingly more systematic. Evaluation of infants' fixation patterns with saliency maps generated by different models of physical salience revealed that although over this age range there was an increase in the correlations between infants' fixations and saliency, the amount of variance accounted for by salience actually decreased. At the youngest age, the amount of variance accounted for by salience was very similar to the consistency between infants' fixations, suggesting that the systematicity in these youngest infants' fixations was explained by their attention to physically salient regions. By 12 months, in contrast, the consistency between infants was greater than the variance accounted for by salience, suggesting that the systematicity in older infants' fixations reflected more than their attention to physically salient regions. Together these results show that infants' fixations when viewing natural scenes becomes more systematic and predictable, and that predictability is due to their attention to features other than physical salience.