Pop-out paradigm in oculographic research of visual attention in children under three years of age
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/2687-0223-2020-2-2-117-126Keywords:
pop-out paradigm, oculography, eye-tracking, oculomotor behaviour, visual attention, visual search, early development, autistic spectrum disorderAbstract
The article provides an overview of foreign oculographic pop-out paradigm studies devoted to the analysis of selective attention and visual search in children under three years of age. Pop-out paradigm is defined as tasks where a target with one unique perceptual feature is presented among an array of distractors and, thus, this target attracts a child’s attention. One of the crucial characteristics of visual search in pop-out paradigm is independence of the time required to detect the target from a number of distractors in the array. Pop-out paradigm is widely used to investigate the visual perception of human faces in young children, since many researchers consider attention to faces in infants to be a significant predictor of communicative and socio-emotional development. A steady focus on faces was observed in infants from 4 months. In several studies the purpose was to reveal which specific features make images of faces priority for perception. It was found that some factors, i.e. inversion of brightness, displacement of elements, pixel shuffling, and schematic depiction significantly reduced recognition of this stimulus among distractors. In addition, pop-out paradigm is used to analyze children’s perception of simple non-social stimuli. Typically developing babies are able to recognize a moving stimulus among stationary distractors at 3 months, and at a later age they successfully recognize stimuli that differ in size, colour, or orientation. Children with family risk of ASD demonstrated a higher level of recognizing simple non-social stimuli. There are some contradictions in the results regarding the dynamics of visual search effectiveness in normative participants from infancy to 3 years which may be due to differences in the design of the experiments and the assessment criteria for the task performance. Most researchers agree that the physiological mechanism of visual search is associated with low-level processing of visual information in the primary visual cortex (V1) via intra-cortical connections and projections to the frontal visual fields.
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