It's the Child's Body: The Role of Toddler and Parent in Selecting Toddler's Visual Experience

Human visual experience is tightly coupled to action - to the perceiver's eye, head, hand and body movements. Social interactions and joint attention are also tied to action, to the mutually influencing and coupled eye, head, hand and body movements of the participants. This study considers the role of the child's own sensory-motor dynamics and those of the social partner in structuring the visual experiences of the toddler. To capture the first-person visual experience, a mini head-mounted camera was placed on the participants' forehead. Two social contexts were studied: 1) parent-child play wherein children and parents jointly played with toys; and 2) child play alone wherein parents were asked to read a document while letting the child play by himself. Visual information from the child's first person view and manual actions from both participants were processed and analyzed. The main finding is that the dynamics of the toddler's visual experience did not differ significantly between the two conditions, showing in both conditions highly selective views that largely reduced noise perceived by the child. These views were strongly related to the child's own head and hand actions. Although the dynamics of children's visual experience appear dependent mainly on their own body dynamics, parents also play a complementary role in selecting the targets for the child's momentary attention.