Scene exploration during development: influence of perceptual features and semantic context on visual attention
There is extensive evidence on the developmental mechanisms underlying oculomotor functions in stimulus-driven tasks. However, less is known about developing eyemovement behaviour during free exploration of scenes. The present dissertation investigates developmental mechanisms underlying scene explo...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2016 |
| País: | Chile |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.anid.cl:10533/220347 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/10533/220347 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Ciencias Sociales Psicología Psicología (Incluyendo la relación hombre-máquina) |
| Sumario: | There is extensive evidence on the developmental mechanisms underlying oculomotor functions in stimulus-driven tasks. However, less is known about developing eyemovement behaviour during free exploration of scenes. The present dissertation investigates developmental mechanisms underlying scene exploration using eye-tracking and event-related potential (ERP) techniques. The two main aims were to investigate the development of visual attention strategies from early infancy to late childhood and to examine the interaction between bottom-up and top-down control during scene viewing in young children. Studies I and II employed eye-tracking analyses to investigate development of oculomotor functions (fixation durations and saccade amplitudes) and visual attention strategies (ambient versus focal) during scene viewing from 3 months to 10 years of age. Results showed that during scene exploration, the fixation durations decreased from the age of 12 months up to 6 to 8 years, while saccade amplitudes reached adult values at 4 to 6 years of age. Previous studies have shown that fixation durations tend to increase, while saccade amplitudes decrease over time. This time course of fixation durations and saccade amplitudes has been associated to ambient and focal strategies during scene exploration. We found a similar time course for fixation durations at 12 months of age but not in younger infants, suggesting that ambient and focal modes emerge by this age. The time course associated to ambient and focal mode was found both the fixation and the saccade parameters from 2 years of age. However, scene exploration was dominated by the focal mode up to 6 years of age. Likewise, visual saliency guided eye movement behaviour more in children younger than 6 years compared with older children and adults. In Study III eye movements were recorded to examine the influence of topdown (semantic consistency and linguistic) and bottom-up (perceptual saliency) guidance on visual attention during scene viewing in 24-month-old children and adults. Results showed that both 2-year-old children and adults looked longer to semantically inconsistent and high-salient objects than semantically consistent and low-salient objects. However, only children were attracted faster to high-salient objects. Even though semantically inconsistent and high-salient objects attracted equally the gaze of normal-to-high and normal-to-low producers, the consistent objects attracted significantly more the attention of toddlers with higher than lower vocabulary skills. In Study IV, ERPs were used to compare the effect of visual scene-context on word processing in 24-month-olds when exposed to consistent and inconsistent scene-word pairs. In addition, the influence of language skills in scene-word interactions was analysed. Results revealed that amplitudes of the N400 component were more pronounced for inconsistent than for consistent scene-word pairs. Normal-to-low producers exhibited a later N400 effect over the right frontal recording sites whereas in the group of normal-to-high producers, the N400 effect was observed earlier over the left frontal sites. These findings indicate that 2-year-olds integrate contextual scene knowledge to subsequent word processing but language skills affect the latency and distribution of the N400 during contextual priming. |
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