Visually Guided Saccades and The Pursuit of Orienting and Motor Correlates of Joint Attention in Early Childhood

Abstract

Background: Oculomotor variability across early development, and its potential role in influencing joint attention performance, is not well understood. This dissertation examines visual orienting and oculomotor variability association with joint attention using a dynamic animation task.Methods: Visually guided saccades and general saccades were evaluated during a dynamic animation eye-tracking task in a cohort of 250 typically developing children. Subsets also had concurrent measures of static gap overlap eye-tracking task, parent report of orienting behavior, and a behavioral measure of joint attention. Results: The processing approach for the infant/early childhood eye-tracking data was empirically determined using a subset of the sample to optimize around noisy and non-robust data. Using the entire longitudinal sample collected from 2 to 50 months of age, age effects were present above and beyond the variance accounted for by data quality for visually guided saccades and general saccades. Using the subset of participants with concurrent data collection of the gap overlap task, no significant associates were identified between visually guided saccades during the dynamic animations and gap overlap task. Furthermore, using the subset of participants with concurrent data collection of the dimensional joint attention assessment, visually guided saccade latency and dynamics were not associated with concurrent measures of joint attention. Conclusions: Visual orienting and oculomotor variability during dynamic animation tasks were not predictive of concurrent measures of joint attention or associated similar measures of simpler static tasks, though orienting demonstrated age-related changes.