The Statistics of Infant First-Person Visual Experience

Project Summary/Abstract: In the first year after birth, human sensitivity develops markedly to the fundamental features on which all higher- level vision depends: contrast, spatial scale, edge orientations, chromatic content. It is well known that this development is highly dependent on visual experience because disruptions in experience have significant and, in some cases, permanent consequences for vision from sensation to cognition. The field does not have, however, an empirical characterization of the low-level feature statistics of typical infant visual experience. This gap is critical because emerging studies of higher-level content indicate these statistical properties change with development and are dependent on the infant’s own changing internal visual biases and behaviors (eye movements, head movements, other body movements). These factors play a direct role in selecting and organizing the spatial structure of images projected to the eye. This project will collect and analyze the first- person visual experiences of 200 infants (50 each) at 2-3, 5-6, 8-9, and 11-12 months of age, plus a sample of 20 infants tested at all of those ages. The core hypothesis is that the statistics change systematically in a developmentally consistent sequence in the everyday lives of infants. The experiences are collected by infant head cameras worn for hours in the home and precision measures of eye and head movements in the laboratory. Analyses will quantify the spatial organization of fundamental low-level features in the collected images as a function of age, posture, activity, and specific contents. The project will also characterize the influence of refractive error and front-end visual immaturities on the images. The research will determine how infants’ behaviors influence the spatial organization of visual features in the input by analyzing the motion patterns in the at-home head-camera images and through direct measures of eye and head motion patterns in the laboratory. The research will provide the first characterization of the natural visual statistics of infant experience in the first year after birth and is expected to reveal specific developmental risk-points in those expected visual statistics.