Uncomfortable staring? Gaze to other people in social situations is inhibited in both infants and adults

Coregistration of EEG and eye-tracking in infants and developing populations

Infants cannot be instructed where to look; therefore, infant researchers rely on observation of their participant's gaze to make inferences about their cognitive processes. They therefore started studying infant attention in the real world from early on. Developmental researchers were early adopters of methods combining observations of gaze and behaviour with electroencephalography (EEG) to study attention and other cognitive functions. However, the direct combination of eye-tracking methods and EEG to test infants is still rare, as it includes specific challenges. The current article reviews the development of co-registration research in infancy. It points out specific challenges of co-registration in infant research and suggests ways to overcome them. It ends with recommendations for implementing the co-registration of EEG and eye-tracking in infant research to maximise the benefits of the two measures and their combination and to orient on Open Science principles while doing so. In summary, this work shows that the co-registration of EEG and eye-tracking in infant research can be beneficial to studying natural and real-world behaviour despite its challenges.

Gaze behavior in response to affect during natural social interactions

Attention in social interactions is directed by social cues such as the face or eye region of an interaction partner. Several factors that influence these attentional biases have been identified in the past. However, most findings are based on paradigms with static stimuli and no interaction potential. Therefore, the current study investigated the influence of one of these factors, namely facial affect in natural social interactions using an evaluated eye-tracking setup. In a sample of 35 female participants, we examined how individuals' gaze behavior responds to changes in the facial affect of an interaction partner trained in affect modulation. Our goal was to analyze the effects on attention to facial features and to investigate their temporal dynamics in a natural social interaction. The study results, obtained from both aggregated and dynamic analyses, indicate that facial affect has only subtle influences on gaze behavior during social interactions. In a sample with high measurement precision, these findings highlight the difficulties of capturing the subtleties of social attention in more naturalistic settings. The methodology used in this study serves as a foundation for future research on social attention differences in more ecologically valid scenarios.