Abstract
Building on decades of research on infants’ visual perception of simplified experimental stimuli, recent attention has been directed at infants’ visual perception of naturalistic scenes (e.g., Pomaranski et al., 2021; van Renswoude et al., 2019). These studies have revealed patterns consistent both with work examining adults’ scene perception and developmental changes in infants’ viewing and perception of simpler stimuli. However, this work has focused on infants’ scanning of photographs taken by and for adults. Thus, both the content and the point of view may be unfamiliar to infants. Here, we recorded eye movements of seventy-four 5- to 10-month-old infants as they viewed photographs of scenes types familiar to infants (e.g., toys on the floor of a living room, playgrounds), taken from both an adult and an infant point of view. Following previous research, we asked how physical salience as modeled by the Graph Based Visual Salience toolbox (GBVS, Harel et al., 2007) predicted infants’ eye gaze at both types of scenes. We found that the fit between GBVS salience and the distribution of infants’ fixations increased over this age range, F(1, 2086) = 9.33, p = .002. However, we also observed that the fit between GBVS salience and infant fixation was better for images from an adult point of view than for images from an infant point of view, F(1, 2021.76) = 4.48, p = .03, suggesting that physical salience may have a stronger influence on where infants look when they view less familiar and less meaningful scenes.