Federated Research Data Repository / dépôt fédéré de données de recherche
Yeung, H. Henny;
Denison, Stephanie;
Johnson, Scott P.
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2016-07-27
Research on infants' reasoning abilities often rely on looking times, which are longer to surprising and unexpected visual scenes compared to unsurprising and expected ones. Few researchers have examined more precise visual scanning patterns in these scenes, and so, here, we recorded 8- to 11-month-olds' gaze with an eye tracker as we presented a sampling event whose outcome was either surprising, neutral, or unsurprising: A red (or yellow) ball was drawn from one of three visible containers populated 0%, 50%, or 100% with identically colored balls. When measuring looking time to the whole scene, infants were insensitive to the likelihood of the sampling event, replicating failures in similar paradigms. Nevertheless, a new analysis of visual scanning showed that infants did spend more time fixating specific areas-of-interest as a function of the event likelihood. The drawn ball and its associated container attracted more looking than the other containers in the 0% condition, but this pattern was weaker in the 50% condition, and even less strong in the 100% condition. Results suggest that measuring where infants look may be more sensitive than simply how much looking there is to the whole scene. The advantages of eye tracking measures over traditional looking measures are discussed. The Excel file here includes information about cumulative eye-tracker coded looking to the various AOIs (areas of interest). Additional information about the spreadsheet's column headers can be found in the accompanying ReadMe (ReadMe.txt). Confidentiality declaration: Consent procedures were approved by the UCLA North General Institutional Review Board, which included written consent from all infants' parents prior to study participation. Confidentiality of the participants is maintained here, because anonymous subject numbers are used to label the data, which cannot be linked to any confidential subject information. This dataset was originally deposited in the Simon Fraser University institutional repository.