Edge structure influences infants’ and toddlers’ engagement with natural scenes

Low-level features, or basic visual properties like color, luminance, and orientation, guide visual attention across the lifespan. We evaluated how variations in one low-level feature, edge structure, related to visual attention to natural scenes (i.e., photographs of places such as kitchens and landscapes) across the first two postnatal years of life. Specifically, we asked how the proportion of cardinal edges (i.e., horizontal and vertical) as well as the edge quantity within scenes related to infants’ ( N = 107, 5 to 12 months; 63 girls and 44 boys, 39.25% were White and not Hispanic, and the remaining infants were Asian, Black, Multiracial, and/or Hispanic) and toddlers’ ( N = 79, 13 to 21 months; 39 girls, 39 boys, 1 not reported, 45.57% were White and not Hispanic, and the remaining toddlers were Asian, Black, Multiracial, and/or Hispanic) visual attention to those scenes. We found that infants looked longer at scenes with more edges and decreased their looking to scenes with a higher proportion of cardinal edges. In contrast, toddlers looked longer at scenes with a moderate proportion of cardinal edges, and their looking was unrelated to edge quantity. Within both samples, we found that the role of these edge properties changed with age. Therefore, there appear to be developmental changes from infancy to toddlerhood in the role of edge structure on children’s attention to natural scenes. Open practices statement Materials that support the findings of this study are openly available on OSF ( https://osf.io/zdghu ). We provide fixation data for both experiments, analysis code, and experiment stimuli. Experiments were not preregistered.