Infant Visual Habituation Based on First-Person Exploration

Abstract

The everyday experience of a toddler involves eating, sleeping, and, of course, playing with toys. Since manipulating objects is such an integral part of the early human experience, understanding visual processing and attention during the exploration of toys in real life is crucial to developmental psychology. Previous studies have focused on infant visual development in regard to lab-controlled stimuli. The small amount of work to date looking at natural stimuli produced by infants has focused on computational model responses. Therefore, there is a gap in the understanding of how actual infants process naturalistic infant-driven stimuli. The current study seeks to understand if naturalistic exploration of toys collected via headcam videos results in varied visual object knowledge which could lead to different habituation rates and differences in novelty toy preferences compared to a control video condition. Nine infants between the ages of 18-24 months viewed several ten second clips of either a naturalistic egocentric video of a similar aged infant exploring a toy or a control video of the same toy. Following such clips, the infant was presented immediately with the test trial, which included a slide with the toy from the video on one side and a novel toy on the other. Visual object knowledge was determined based on the proportion of looking time towards the novel toy. The infants’ looking time proportions were compared within conditions between the familiar and novel toy to determine toy preferences and habituation, as well as, between the control and naturalistic conditions to uncover fundamental differences between a natural scenario and a laboratory scenario. With the small sample collected, infants showed no preference towards either the novel or familiar toys in either the naturalistic or control condition, demonstrating a lack of full habituation. The results also showed that there was no significant difference between the naturalistic and control conditions in terms of novelty toy proportion of looking time.