Postural developments modulate children's visual access to social information

The ability to process social information is a critical component of children’s early language and cognitive development. However, as children reach their first birthday, they begin to locomote themselves, dramatically affecting their visual access to this information. How do these postural and locomotor changes affect children’s access to the social information relevant for word-learning? Here, we explore this question by using head-mounted cameras to record 36 infants’ (8-16 months of age) egocentric visual perspective and use computer vision algorithms to estimate the proportion of faces and hands in infants’ environments. We find that infants’ posture and orientation to their caregiver modulates their access to social information, confirming previous work that suggests motoric developments play a significant role in the emergence of children’s linguistic and social capacities. We suggest that the combined use of head-mounted cameras and the application of new computer vision techniques is a promising avenue for understanding the statistics of infants’ visual and linguistic experience.

[1]  J. Javůrek.  [Motor development]. , 1988, Ceskoslovenska pediatrie.

[2]  Gustaf Gredebäck,et al.  The development of joint visual attention: a longitudinal study of gaze following during interactions with mothers and strangers. , 2010, Developmental science.

[3]  Joseph J Campos,et al.  Infant language development is related to the acquisition of walking. , 2014, Developmental psychology.

[4]  Karen E Adolph,et al.  Crawling and walking infants elicit different verbal responses from mothers. , 2014, Developmental science.

[5]  Michael C. Frank,et al.  Visual search and attention to faces during early infancy. , 2014, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[6]  Michael C. Frank,et al.  Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free-Viewing. , 2012, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[7]  G. Csibra,et al.  Natural pedagogy , 2009, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[8]  Walter J. Scheirer,et al.  Perceptual Annotation: Measuring Human Vision to Improve Computer Vision , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[9]  Kasey C. Soska,et al.  Head-mounted eye tracking: a new method to describe infant looking. , 2011, Child development.

[10]  Yaser Sheikh,et al.  OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation Using Part Affinity Fields , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[11]  Varun Ramakrishna,et al.  Convolutional Pose Machines , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[12]  Clinton Freeman,et al.  Toward Open Behavioral Science , 2012, Psychological inquiry.

[13]  D L Mayer,et al.  Visual fields of infants assessed with a new perimetric technique. , 1988, Investigative ophthalmology & visual science.

[14]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Statistical word learning at scale: the baby's view is better. , 2013, Developmental science.

[15]  James M. Rehg,et al.  Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names , 2017, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[16]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Eye contact detection in humans from birth , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  John M. Franchak,et al.  Crawling and walking infants see the world differently. , 2014, Child development.

[18]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience. , 2008, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[19]  Daniela Corbetta,et al.  Spatial Exploration and Changes in Infant–Mother Dyads Around Transitions in Infant Locomotion , 2017, Developmental psychology.

[20]  Michael C. Frank,et al.  Developmental and postural changes in children's visual access to faces , 2013, CogSci.

[21]  Yu Qiao,et al.  Joint Face Detection and Alignment Using Multitask Cascaded Convolutional Networks , 2016, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[22]  Yaser Sheikh,et al.  Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images Using Multiview Bootstrapping , 2017, 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[23]  Kari S Kretch,et al.  See and be seen: Infant-caregiver social looking during locomotor free play. , 2018, Developmental science.

[24]  A. Meltzoff.  'Like me': a foundation for social cognition. , 2007, Developmental science.

[25]  Anne B. Fulton,et al.  Visual fields of young children , 1988, Behavioural Brain Research.

[26]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Robust Real-Time Face Detection , 2001, Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2001.

[27]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  An egocentric perspective on active vision and visual object learning in toddlers , 2017, 2017 Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob).

[28]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  From faces to hands: Changing visual input in the first two years , 2016, Cognition.