Abstract
Rationale: Infant visual attention is a foundational information-gathering mechanism that shapes learning and higher-order cognition (Colombo, 2001). The majority of knowledge on visual attention development has been drawn from small samples of infants assessed in artificial laboratory settings. These contexts drastically differ from the visually-rich environments that infants’ experience in their day-to-day life. Here we examine how naturalistic variations in the complexity of the home visual environment impacts infant attention. We examine this question by measuring infant looking behavior in the home using OWLET – a novel Online Webcam-Linked Eye Tracker (Werchan, Thomason, & Brito, 2022). Method: 140 six-month-old infants were enrolled in an ongoing remote longitudinal study. Images of families’ homes were recorded and rated for visual complexity on a 7-point Likert scale. OWLET was used to measure infant looking behavior during a standard attention task adapted for remote testing (Gustafsson et al., 2021). Results: We first evaluated the validity of OWLET for assessing infant attention in the home. Our results indicated robust correlations between OWLET measures and parent-report measures of infant attention, rs > .22, ps < .02. We then examined whether the complexity of the home visual environment predicted individual differences in attention, using a composite measure of attention derived through confirmatory factor analysis with infants’ looking durations, gaze patterns, and regulatory capacity as indicators. Controlling for family socioeconomic status, results indicated that greater home visual complexity predicted better attention, β = .20, p = .02. Conclusion: This work demonstrates the validity of webcam eye tracking for assessing infant attention in the home. Importantly, these findings also suggest that variations in the visual complexity of the home predict infant attention, above and beyond effects of socioeconomic factors. These results provide insight into how early sociocultural contexts shape attention development, with potential implications for subsequent learning and cognition.