The role of motor development and point-of-view on infant attention to naturalistic scenes.

We assessed the effects of scene features and locomotor status on visual fixations in 52 infants (Mage = 26.51 weeks, SDage = 4.77; 28 boys, 23 girls; 24 infants were White and non-Hispanic and 28 were Asian, Black, Mixed Race, and/or Hispanic) while viewing photographs of naturalistic spaces, such as living rooms containing furniture and toys. We evaluated the impact of local meaning, defined by adult ratings of information density at specific scene locations. This local meaning affected crawling and non-crawling infants differently depending on perspective. Whereas non-crawlers fixated high-meaning areas in lower vantage point scenes, crawlers prioritized meaning from higher vantage points, suggesting that independent self-locomotion may tune cognitive resources to prioritize new features of the visual world.