Speaker
Description
Children's initial steps towards social interaction begin with their attention to a desired social partner, typically by focusing on the partner's face. While research has shown that children tend to look more at adults' faces than children's faces in controlled environments, this may not accurately reflect the complexities of real-world social interactions. To gain a deeper understanding of children's social preferences, we conducted two studies to examine their attention to adults and children in both laboratory and natural settings.
In a lab-based study, we found that young children under the age of 3 tend to look more at adults than children, whereas this preference is not present in children aged 4-11. With the advent of advanced technologies, such as head-mounted eye-trackers, we can now investigate children's looking behavior in natural settings with live social partners. Our recent study employed this technology to examine children's attention to adults' and children's faces as they navigate a crowded room. We hypothesize that children will exhibit a preference for looking at child and infant faces compared to adult faces, and this preference may be modulated by their familiarity and experience with the faces in view.
Our ongoing data analysis will provide valuable insights into children's social interest in people of different ages in real-world settings. This research offers an interesting perspective on children's experiences in social interactions, shedding new light on the complexities of social interactions and providing an interesting angle for this conference.
