Understanding the Distribution of Infant Attention: A Dynamical Systems Approach

A process model is presented to account for infant looking patterns in habituation and preferential looking experiments. The model emphasizes the infant’s own role in controlling exposure to stimuli. Operating on the level of individual fixations in continuous time, the model ties cumulative looking times to patterns of individual looks. The process described does not make use of a spatial map of stimuli. We explore the behavior of the model using fixed trials, infant-controlled trials, paired presentations, and preferential looking procedures, examining both group and individual measures of cumulative looking times and individual fixations.