Semantic content outweighs low-level saliency in determining children’s and adults’ fixation of movies

Andrew T Rider (1) , Antoine Coutrot (1) , Elizabeth Pellicano (2) , Steven C Dakin (3) , Isabelle Mareschal (4)

1 UCL - University College of London [London]
2 UWA - The University of Western Australia
3 University of Auckland [Auckland]
4 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London

To make sense of the visual world, we need to move our eyes to focus regions of interest on the high-resolution fovea. Eye movements , therefore, give us a way to infer mechanisms of visual processing and attention allocation. Here, we examined age-related differences in visual processing by recording eye movements from 37 children (aged 6-14 years) and 10 adults while viewing three 5-min dynamic video clips taken from child-friendly movies. The data were analyzed in two complementary ways: (a) gaze based and (b) content based. First, similarity of scanpaths within and across age groups was examined using three different measures of variance (dispersion, clusters, and distance from center). Second, content-based models of fixation were compared to determine which of these provided the best account of our dynamic data. We found that the variance in eye movements decreased as a function of age, suggesting common attentional orienting. Comparison of the different models revealed that a model that relies on faces generally performed better than the other models tested, even for the youngest age group (<10 years). However, the best predictor of a given participant's eye movements was the

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Andrew T Rider, Antoine Coutrot, Elizabeth Pellicano, Steven C Dakin, Isabelle Mareschal. Semantic content outweighs low-level saliency in determining children’s and adults’ fixation of movies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2018, 166, pp.293-309. ⟨10.1016/j.jecp.2017.09.002⟩. ⟨hal-02348572⟩