How Early is Infants' Attention to Objects and Actions Shaped by Culture? New Evidence from 24-Month-Olds Raised in the US and China

Abstract

Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from the US and China deploy their attention to objects and actions in dynamic scenes. By analyzing infants' eye movements while they observed dynamic scenes, the current experiment revealed striking convergences, overall, in infants' patterns of visual attention in the two communities, but also pinpointed a brief period during which their attention reliably diverged. This divergence, though modest, suggested that infants from the US devoted relatively more attention to the objects and those from China devoted relatively more attention to the actions in which they were engaged. This provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants' attention to objects and events in dynamic scenes, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants' attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.

Keywords: actions; attention; china; culture; dynamic events; infants; objects; united states.

Figure 1

The continuous timecourse (in seconds) of visual attention as it unfolds in real time over the entire test trial. Shown here is the proportion of time infants devoted to the New Object—Familiar Action test scene (calculated as time looking at the New Object—Familiar Action scene divided by time looking at both the New Object—Familiar Action and the New Action—Familiar Object test scenes, with data aggregated across all trials for infants from the US and China. Proportions at 0.5 indicate equal attention to both scenes. Proportions near 1.0 indicate looking predominantly to the New Object -Familiar Action scene. Proportions near 0 indicate looking predominantly toward the New Action—Familiar Object scene. The shaded regions around each time-course line represents ±1 standard error of the mean (SEM); the asterisk denotes the significant effect during the baseline period revealed in the growth curve analysis (GCA). The horizontal line marks the segment in the baseline period when infants' attention in the two countries diverged (2.20–3.05 s, cluster-based permutation analysis). This segment occupies 21.2% of the baseline period and 8.5% of the entire test phase (baseline and response combined).