Are Children ‘Stickier’ Than We Think? How Novelty Shapes Developmental Differences in Visual Attention

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Aarthi Ravi¹ (aarthi.ravi@mail.utoronto.ca), Josie Davies¹, Shelby Suhan¹, Amy Finn¹; ¹University of Toronto

Children explore the world differently than adults, using broad attentional strategies that narrow with age. However, conflicting findings suggest children may not be as exploratory as assumed. While eye-tracking research shows younger children exhibit less exploration during scene viewing, these results may be influenced by task demands or the novelty of stimuli. Novelty, which increases exploratory eye movements in adults, has yet to be examined in children. This study investigates eye movements in 4–to 6-year-olds and adults viewing novel and familiar scenes. By analyzing fixation duration, fixation count, saccade count, and saccade amplitude, we aim to clarify developmental differences in visual exploration and whether novelty enhances or reduces exploration across development. Following the viewing task, participants completed a surprise memory test to assess recognition performance. Preliminary results suggest that children are ‘stickier’ than adults, with fewer saccades, fewer fixations, and longer fixation durations. Unexpectedly, children exhibited larger saccade amplitudes compared to adults, contradicting previous findings. This may indicate that while children’s attention is more anchored when they do shift their gaze, they cover greater distances across a scene. Repetition effects were less pronounced than predicted. In terms of memory, children were less sensitive in detecting old from new images and were less able to discriminate lures than adults. Both groups showed better memory for repeated scenes compared to those viewed once. The next steps include collecting more data to confirm these findings and including 8– to 10-year-olds to explore developmental trends in scene exploration.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Development & aging