New views of visual development: Insights from eye tracking

Debates on the nature of infant cognitive development are long and  heated.  Traditional approaches stem from the pioneering work of Jean Piaget in the early 20th century and stress complex, multiplicative  contributions to development.  More recent views stem from a  burgeoning literature on the "competent infant" and stress the  apparently unlearned capacities of young infants for dealing with the social and physical environment.  The dominant dependent measure at  present is infant looking time, a tool effective in gauging infant  preferences, yet incapable of revealing more fine grained oculomotor  behaviors.  In this talk I will describe eye tracking experiments  that begin to shed new light on infant visual attention, and I will discuss implications for cognitive development more generally.  These  new findings are consistent with theories that stress both an early  preparedness and an attunement to the environment that unfolds over  time, and promise to yield a more complete and nuanced picture of  developmental process.