Attentional biases in free viewing of complex scenes in preschoolers and adults

Adult gaze behaviour towards naturalistic scenes is highly biased towards semantic object information. Little is known about the ontological development of these biases, nor about group-level differences in gaze behaviour between adults and pre-schoolers. Here, we let pre-schoolers (n = 34, 5 years) and adults (n = 42, age 18-59 years) freely view 40 complex scenes containing objects with different semantic attributes to compare their fixation behaviour. Results show that preschool children allocate a significantly larger proportion of dwell time towards Faces, Touched objects, Hands and objects with implied Motion, but significantly less on Text. Interestingly, fewer first fixations of pre-schoolers landed on either Faces or Text, but more on Touched objects, Hands and Bodies. Follow up analyses excluding Text fixations revealed attentional biases towards Touched objects and Hands in children vs. adults. These findings suggest a developmental antagonism between text and touched objects-hand salience, which would resonate with recent findings regarding ‘cortical recycling’. We discuss this and other potential mechanisms driving salience differences between children and adults.