Linda Smith, Ph.D

Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences

Indiana University

Controlling the input: A new framework for the study of visual attention in infancy

Much of the information in the world is latent, not revealed without some action by the perceiver. What we see, for example, depends on our posture, on where we turn our heads and eyes, what we do with our hands, where we move and how we move. All these behaviors select and create visual experiences. They also offer a way to control the input, to optimize the external signal of targets of attention and to dampen signals from distractors. These behaviors change dramatically over the first two years oflife post birth, creating new challenges and new opportunities for visual attention. In this talk, I will present findings from our analyses of the visual statistics of infant ego-centric images ( collected at the scale of daily life in the home). The data show how infant behavior optimizes the visibility of targets of attention and dampens the visibility of distractors, and in so doing biases the daily-life statistics of visual experience. The statistics in there input (sensory, semantic, temporal) change systematically with age. I will focus on the role of developmental changes eye, head and hand movements. I will note that another factor in the developmental changes is the learning of world-level visual statistics from the ordered curriculum of the developmentally changing statistics. These learned world statistics, priors, all influence behaviors that select and create visual experiences. The findings have relevance to experience-dependent visual development, more generally. But in this talk, I want to consider the implications for the development of the self-regulation of attention. There is currently much discontent with the dominant framework - distinct and competing endogenous and exogenous systems -- for conceptualizing the development of the self-control of attention. Here, in light of the data on infants' control of the input, I propose a new more integrated framework for understanding the development of visual attention in infancy. development and the world visual statistics learned by the infant), I propose a new framework .