Abstract
The visual experience of a young infant is defined by their direction of gaze in their environment, which is dependent on the combination of their head and eye movements. We know very little about the statistics of infants’ visual experience and how these statistics change developmentally during infancy. In this study, we examine the statistics of 50,706 egocentric head camera images collected from infants in their habitual environments at 1–3 and 6–8 months of age. Our analyses are organized around two preliminary hypotheses. 1. Younger babies have unique visual experience as a result of their immature vision. 2. This unique visual experience is characterized by a preference for low spatial frequency, high contrast images despite their immature motor capabilities. The results demonstrate that younger babies experience sparse scenes 10% more often than older babies. FFT analysis of the properties of these sparse images demonstrates that the younger infants experience scenes with higher contrast and steeper slopes of their amplitude spectra, suggesting a bias in infants’ experience to more visible image content despite their motor immaturities.