Developmental psychology

Infant study using a Tobii T60 Eye Tracker.

Developmental researchers use eye tracking to explain growth and transformation in cognitive, social and emotional abilities, spanning the period from infancy through young adulthood.

• Understand developmental progression in children’s allocation of attention.
• Measure visual perception related to understanding and recall.
• Measure infants’ ability to recognize motion signals.

• This picture from research shows how a group 12 month old infants look at a scene where a woman is looking at one of two toys.

  Development of control of action.
• Investigate relationships between control of eye movements and reading comprehension.
• Study social interaction characteristics.

For example, vision is an important sensory input for social information. Facial and other gestures convey information on the other person’s intentions, emotions and direction of attention. Perceiving what a person is looking at is an important social skill, facilitating referential communication (ability to comment about objects and be immediately understood). Infants are quite effective at perceiving the facial gestures of adults.

Gaze replay video clip.

This video from research conducted at Uppsala University in Sweden shows that a lot of the baby’s attention is directed towards the face and gaze at the adult. The baby is able to find the object that the adult is referring to.
Tobii eye trackers have proven to be particularly suitable for infant studies, offering high quality data, without requiring head fixations or devices to be mounted on the subject’s head.

Follow the links below for example research using Tobii eye tracking technology.

Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden.

• Research on differences in social interactions in normal children and children with Autism. Click here.  
• Research on development of infant object representation. Click here.