Infants’ Looking to Surprising Events: When Eye-Tracking Reveals More than Looking Time

Research on infants’ reasoning abilities often rely on looking times, which are longer to surprising and unexpected visual scenes compared to unsurprising and expected ones. Few researchers have examined more precise visual scanning patterns in these scenes, and so, here, we recorded 8- to 11-month-olds’ gaze with an eye tracker as we presented a sampling event whose outcome was either surprising, neutral, or unsurprising: A red (or yellow) ball was drawn from one of three visible containers populated 0%, 50%, or 100% with identically colored balls. When measuring looking time to the whole scene, infants were insensitive to the likelihood of the sampling event, replicating failures in similar paradigms. Nevertheless, a new analysis of visual scanning showed that infants did spend more time fixating specific areas-of-interest as a function of the event likelihood. The drawn ball and its associated container attracted more looking than the other containers in the 0% condition, but this pattern was weaker in the 50% condition, and even less strong in the 100% condition. Results suggest that measuring where infants look may be more sensitive than simply how much looking there is to the whole scene. The advantages of eye tracking measures over traditional looking measures are discussed.