Objective assessment of visual attention in toddlerhood

Visual attention is an important mechanism through which children learn about their environment, and individual differences could substantially shape later development. Eyetracking provides a sensitive and scalable tool for assessing visual attention that has potential for objective assessment of child development, but to date the majority of studies are small and replication attempts are rare. This study investigates the feasibility of a comprehensive eye-tracking assessment of visual attention and introduces a shared data resource for the scientific community. Data from eight eyetracking tasks were collected from 350 term-born (166 females) 18-month-olds recruited as neonates http://www.developingconnectome.org/). Analyses showed expected condition effects for seven of eight tasks (p-values from <.001 to .04), an important indication of replicability. Consistent with some theoretical models of visual attention, structural equation modelling indicated participants performance could be explained by two factors representing social and non-social attention. Comprehensive eye-tracking batteries can objectively measure individual differences in core components of visual attention in large-scale toddlerhood studies. This is the first large-scale comprehensive study to present high-quality normative eye-tracking data from a large task battery in toddlers and make them freely available to the scientific community.