The Role of Experience in Shaping Infants’ Visual Attention and Learning

This dissertation presents three studies exploring the important role of experience in shaping infants’ visual attention and learning in infancy. In the first chapter, I provide a general overview of each chapter. In Chapter 2, I examine similarities and differences in the eye movements of 6- to 9-month-old infants from the Sacramento Valley in the US and from rural Malawi in an adaptation of the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) paradigm (Ross-Sheehy et al., 2015). This work adds to a growing literature focused on including more diverse samples of infants in research (Visser et al., 2022; Zaadnoordijk et al., 2021). Extending the findings from Chapter 2, in Chapter 3, I examine the Malawian infants’ visual attention longitudinally over a 6-month period, shedding light on developmental change and stability over time. Together, Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the shared and distinct developmental trajectories within varying cultural and environmental contexts. In Chapter 4, I examine the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically the use of face masks, on a sample of Sacramento Valley infants’ face processing and learning. Finally, Chapter 5 presents a broad overview of the main findings from each study, underscoring the interplay between culture, context, and input and how infants’ developing cognitive processes adapt to diverse experiences

The impact of face masks on infants learning of faces: An eye tracking study.

This preregistered study examined how face masks influenced face memory in a North American sample of 6- to 9-month-old infants (N = 58) born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Infants memory was tested using a standard visual paired comparison (VPC) task. We crossed whether or not the faces were masked during familiarization and test, yielding four trial types (masked-familiarization/masked-test, unmasked-familiarization/masked-test, masked-familiarization/unmasked-test, and unmasked-familiarization/unmasked-test). Infants showed memory for the faces if the faces were unmasked at test, regardless of whether or not the face was masked during familiarization. However, infants did not show robust evidence of memory when test faces were masked, regardless of the familiarization condition. In addition, infants bias for looking at the upper (eye) region was greater for masked than unmasked faces, although this difference was unrelated to memory performance. In summary, although the presence of face masks does appear to influence infants processing of and memory for faces, they can form memories of masked faces and recognize those familiar faces even when unmasked