The Baby Squares Project

Multi-modal events and moving locations:
Eye movements of 6-month-olds reveal dynamic spatial indexing

Natasha Z. Kirkham (kirkham@psych.stanford.edu) and Daniel C. Richardson (richardson@psych.stanford.edu)

 

On this page you can read an overview of the Baby Squares project, taken from various poster presentations and papers. You can download eye tracking recordings of infants in our experiments, and pdf versions of our presentations and papers. This work was carried out in Scott Johnson's Cornell Baby Lab and is related to Hollywood Squares, an adult eye tracking project in collaboration with Michael Spivey.

Here is the most recent publication from the project, which can be downloaded as a pdf.

Richardson, D. C. & Kirkham, N.Z. (2004). Multi-modal events and moving locations: Eye movements of adults and 6-month-olds reveal dynamic spatial indexing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133 (1), 46-62.

Abstract

The ability to keep track of locations in a dynamic, multi-modal environment is crucial for successful interactions with other people and objects. We investigated the existence and flexibility of spatial indexing in adults and 6-month-old infants by adapting an eye-tracking paradigm from Richardson & Spivey (2000). Multi-modal events were presented in specific locations, and eye movements were measured when the auditory portion of the stimulus was presented without its visual counterpart. Experiment 1 showed that adults spatially index auditory information even when the original associated locations move. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that infants are capable of both binding multi-modal events to locations and tracking those locations when they move.

Below we present stimuli and results from the two infant experiments.

Static Ports

Six-month-olds were shown six trials with two moving objects in specific locations, one at a time, each with a unique sound. The infants then heard one of the two sounds with no object present, and their eye movements were recorded. The infants tended to make saccades back to the location previously associated with that sound (p < .04), providing evidence for early emergence of spatial indexing behaviour.

The next study extended these findings by providing evidence that infants’ spatial indexing has some of the hallmarks of the flexible, dynamic system found in adults.

Moving Ports

Six-month-olds were shown two different animated objects on a computer screen. Each object had a distinct sound, and appeared in a certain location in one of two square frames in the top and bottom halves of the screen. The objects appeared, one at a time, for eight seconds. After six presentations, the two squares frames smoothly rotated 90º into a horizontal alignment on the left and right sides of the screen. In two test trials, the sound associated with one of the objects was played while the infants looked at the frames. The infants looked significantly longer at the empty frame associated with the test sound, even though it occupied a new location in space.

This research was presented at the 13th Biennial International Conference On Infant Studies, (April, 2002,Toronto). You can download a five page handout version of the poster which explains the research in more detail.

Conclusion

These results provide evidence for the early emergence of flexible spatial indexing behaviour, and can be allied with current theoretical attempts to find commonalties between infant and adult attentional mechanisms.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Scott Johnson and Michael Spivey for their support and helpful comments, and all the infants and parents without whose participation this research would not be possible. This research was supported by NSF grant BCS-0094814 to Scott Johnson.