Research

Information on research topics
and research ressources at the LFE

Social Attention

Directly after birth, infants orient toward social stimuli, such as human faces, voices or motion. Such preferential attention toward social content crucially helps infants to filter the flood of information and novel impressions they are confronted with in their daily lives. Moreover, it helps children to focus on information helping them to navigate through (and learn about) their social environment.

In our projects we investigate early preferences for social interactions. We are specifically interested in developmental processes in the first year of postnatal life. By using eye tracking in different study paradigms, we measure infants’ gaze patterns and looking times while presenting them with different videos on a screen. The videos depict scenes with adults who engage in social interactions with one another or scenes showing adults acting individually. In addition to investigating infants’ preference for other peoples’ social interactions, we are interested in relations with their own social engagement during interactions with their parents.

Dr. Maleen Thiele
Social Attention