Do cultures influence how people attend to the objects and actions that surround them? Past studies have suggested that it does. But how early culture-specific patterns of attention emerge in development?

A study led by Prof. WAXMAN Sandra’s research team from Northwestern University and Prof. FU Xiaolan’s team from the Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences addressed this issue. By using Eye-Tracking technique, they examined how 24-month-old infant, who are on the threshold of learning words of objects and actions, deployed their attention to objects and actions when they are simply observing dynamic scenes.

At first, all infants watched a series of exemplar scenes (e.g., a girl petting a dog) in the familiarization phase. Then, infants watched new scenes in which either object was switched (the girl petting a pillow) or the action was switched (e.g., the girl kissing a dog) in the test phase. Researchers performed a complementary set of analyses using the eyetrackingR package. The results revealed striking convergences in infants’ patterns of visual attention in the two communities, and pinpointed a brief period in the test phase during which their attention reliably diverged. Infants from China preferred looking at the scenes featuring a new action, while infants from the U.S. preferred scenes featuring a new object (see Figure).

This result not only provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants’ attention to objects and actions, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants’ attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.

Decades of previous research suggests that when observing scenes, adults from the U.S. focus predominantly on objects, while those from China and Japan direct more of their attention to the contexts and action events in which those objects are engaged. Because infants pay attention carefully to the actions of their parents and to others close to them. By 24-month-old, they may have begun to pick up the attentional strategies characteristic of adults in their respective communities, and may be on their way to becoming “native lookers”.

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation. The paper is now available online in Frontiers in Psychology. 

Figure: The continuous timecourse (in seconds) of visual attention as it unfolds in real time over the entire test trial. (Image by FU Xiaolan and ZHAO Minfang)