Studying social attention in different contexts: Are interactive measures of joint attention relatable to eye-tracking measures of social attention.

摘要

There are currently a variety of methods used in the literature to study social attention and it can sometimes be hard to truly know whether the results are comparable. This study gathered data from 30 20-month olds while they participated in two eye-tracking studies: one using semi-naturalistic videos of actors performing infant directed actions, viewed from a first-person perspective, and one using clips from children's cartoons. While recent studies using goal-directed actions have found more attention to objects (Boyer et al., 2015; Lischer & Bertenthal, unpublished), many previous studies have found more attention to faces, with attention to faces growing as infants got older (Frank, Vul & Johnson, 2009; Frank, Amso & Johnson, 2014). By using different types of stimuli, it may be possible to get a better understanding of why some studies may find differing results. The current study found that more attention was allocated to faces in the cartoon videos while more attention was allocated to objects in the goal-directed action videos. This study additionally compared the eye-tracking results with measures of interactive joint attention but did not find any significant correlations between the measures. This suggests that interactive measures of joint attention may not be comparable to eye-tracking measures of social attention.