Eye tracking solutions with a dedicated application, like our software Tobii Pro Lab, can further process the data to draw valuable conclusions on a wide variety of developmental processes, including:
Developmental psychology
Studying children with the help of eye tracking
Gaze is one of the first abilities infants develop, providing researchers with insight into the development process long before speaking begins.
Why use eye tracking?
The challenge is to study infants and small children who typically have short attention spans, cannot sit for long periods, and do not yet understand instructions. Eye tracking overcomes this challenge because it is a non-invasive technology that can extract data about an infant's gaze behavior accurately and rapidly without instructions. It provides developmental researchers with a means to enter the child's mind and determine when capabilities emerge and how they develop over time — even for babies only a few months old.
What you can measure with eye tracking
- Visual perception
- Development of control of action
- Social cognition and interaction
- Oculomotor function development
- Language acquisition
- Clinical developmental research in areas such as early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder and ADHD
What you can study with eye tracking data
There are many ways to leverage eye tracking data in developmental research:
Allocation of visual attention shows how a child assesses facial expressions, their ability to apply understanding and recall, and other relevant processes in the first stages of life.
Anticipatory eye movements show a child's ability to predict events. They can, for example, reveal knowledge about structural or perceptual completion.
Pupil dilation measures a child's arousal and violation of expectations.
Smooth pursuit tests help to understand oculomotor development, such as object-tracking ability.
Research setups for infant and child studies
Screen-based for the lab
For lab environments, our screen-based eye trackers, Tobii Pro Spectrum and Tobii Pro Fusion, produce visual stimuli on a screen and work together with Tobii Pro Lab to deliver insights on study participant reactions.
Screen-based for the field
You can connect the plug-and-play Tobii Pro Fusion eye tracker to any screen at a school, hospital, or library to collect data in the field in a nonintrusive way. Works together with Tobii Pro Lab to deliver insights on behavior.
Standalone for the lab
With Tobii Pro Spectrum in standalone mode, data capture can take place while children observe or interact with people and physical objects. Works together with Tobii Pro Lab to deliver insights on behavior.
Wearable for the real world
Designed for on-the-go data capture, our Tobii Pro Glasses 3 wearable eye tracker (suitable for 5+ years) allows children to interact and move around freely, enabling you to design studies that closely reflect real-world scenarios — for the lab and the field.
Related content
Three scientific studies shed new light on early learning processes
Researchers use attention computing to reveal the impact on how kids learn of: attention bias to faces, individual preferences, and social interaction.
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Eye tracking explains development of infants’ abilities
Eye tracking is used in developmental psychology to explain infants' growth and transformation in cognitive, social and emotional abilities.
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Understanding how children learn language
New York University’s Learn Lab uses eye tracking to study the learning mechanisms underlying language acquisition in children who are typically developing as well as children on the autism spectrum.
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Understanding child psychology with eye tracking
In this webinar experienced researchers will share their insights using eye tracking in developmental, clinical, and educational-psychology research in infants and children. Furthermore, you will get the chance to learn from our own experts about different use cases and how the eye tracking software Tobii Pro Lab works.
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Insights into autism research with eye tracking
In this panel discussion, research experts from Stanford School of Medicine, Uppsala University, and Karolinska Institute shared their experiences with the unique insights eye tracking provides in the field of autism and answered audience questions.
Learn moreRelated products
Tobii Pro Spectrum
This high-performance research system captures gaze data at speeds up to 1200 Hz. A screen-based eye tracker for extensive research from fixation-based studies to micro-saccades.
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Tobii Pro Fusion
Screen-based eye tracker, capturing gaze data at speeds up to 250 Hz. This powerful research system supports from fixation to saccade-based research outside of the lab.
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Tobii Pro Lab
Tobii Pro Lab, our eye tracking software supporting screen-based and wearable eye trackers. Guides the researcher through the entire research workflow.
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Tobii Pro Glasses 3
Designed for the real world, our third-generation wearable eye tracker allows you to conduct behavioral research in a wide range of settings.
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New! The eye tracking starter kit
Kick-off your eye tracking research with our best-in-class hardware and software bundle.
Learn moreEye tracking and developmental research
Infants’ attention bias to faces as an early marker of social development
For this longitudinal study, Peltola and colleagues (2018) used a screen-based eye tracker to investigate attentional biases toward faces in 7-month-old infants and the correlation with empathy and helping responses as the child develops. The researchers used a face-distractor competition paradigm, concluding that increased facial attention at seven months relates to raised helping responses at 24 months and reduced callous-unemotional traits at 48 months.
Children learn words easier when they are interested in the category to which the word belongs
Ackermann and colleagues (2019) examined how a child's interest in a particular category of objects — such as animals or vehicles — impacts learning robustness of new word-object associations. They used pupillometry measurements to determine the level of interest in categories and objects and proportion-of-gaze time to target and measure word recognition.
Social interaction targets enhance 13-month-old infants' associative learning
Thiele and colleagues (2020) studied selective learning in 13-month-old infants. Using screen-based eye tracking, the researchers identified faster saccadic latencies and more predictive gaze shifts in trials that included social interaction compared with those that didn’t. These findings support the view that infants find it intrinsically valuable to observe social interactions.
Enabling success
Tobii offers tailored support to address research needs throughout your journey with Tobii’s eye tracking.
Tobii Funding support services
Tobii Funding support services help you improve your grant proposals for research that includes eye tracking in its methodology
Tobii Connect
Tobii Connect delivers product documentation, how-to guides, and answers to FAQs as well as access to software updates. Our customer care services help with any technical issues concerning Tobii products.
Tobii Academy
Tobii Academy our online learning platform, helping you ensure study success at every step of the way from study design to interpreting your eye tracking data.
Publications
Shinya, Yuta, Masahiko Kawai, Fusako Niwa, Yasuhiro Kanakogi, Masahiro Imafuku, and Masako Myowa. "Cognitive flexibility in 12-month-old preterm and term infants is associated with neurobehavioural development in 18-month-olds." Scientific reports (2022).
Michel, Christine, Sabina Pauen, and Stefanie Hoehl. "When it pays off to take a look: Infants learn to follow an object’s motion with their gaze—Especially if it features eyes." Infancy (2022).
Senzaki, Sawa, and Yuki Shimizu. "Different types of focus: Caregiver–child interaction and changes in preschool children’s attention in two cultures." Child Development (2022).
Jackson, Iain R., and Sylvain Sirois. "But that’s possible! Infants, pupils, and impossible events." Infant Behavior and Development (2022).
Arias-Trejo, Natalia, Armando Q. Angulo-Chavira, Daniela S. Avila-Varela, Fernanda Chua-Rodriguez, and Nivedita Mani. "Developmental changes in phonological and semantic priming effects in Spanish-speaking toddlers." Developmental Psychology (2022).