Abstract
Infants and young children learn by viewing and interacting with their world (Gibson, 1969). While previous developmental studies have used a camera to document toddlers' everyday activities from a third-person perspective, we have recently developed a new technique that allows us to collect multiple streams of data simultaneously to gain insight into the first-person perspective of a young toddler. We collected eye movements using a Tobii X120 eye tracker, head and hand movements using 6D position sensors and the first person perspective of the visual field using a mini-camera attached to the head of the toddler. The toddlers viewed balls on rods emerging from a puppet show theater to a point where they could look, touch and interact with them.
The data indicate that 59% of the time the head, hands and eyes were stationary, as compared with less than 1% of the time when all three were moving. Furthermore, eyes were moving less than 1% of the time while hands and head were still. The data provide fine-grained dynamic information about the first-person perspective of young toddlers, and provide new insights about the the multimodal organization of attention, perception and action as toddlers interact with their caregivers and the world around them.