Gaze behaviour during natural parent-child interaction

The social world, in which infants develop, is centred around their primary caregiver and for this reason it is of particular interest to consider how this early social interaction may influence how infants develop. A measure of the of the parent-child interaction (PCI), is commonly used in infant research projects seeking to generate models about the social and emotional development of children. These have shown that early individual differences in the PCI are related to a variety of differences at later ages such as receptive and expressive language, ability to remain task focused and delay of gratification.
However, previous PCI coding-schemes often fail to capture the microdynamics of the interaction, such as eye-gaze patterns. This limitation has mainly been due to limited technical resources for objectively measuring such microdynamics. The proposed PhD project will overcome this challenge with the use of infant head-mounted eye-tracking, which can capture the microdynamics of gaze exchange and joint attention during the PCI. We aim to answer one of the fundamental questions in developmental psychology, the impact of parental behaviour on the dynamics of parent-child communication and cognitive and affective development of young infants. It will combine live eye-tracking, behavioural coding of PCI and standardised assessment of child development, to assess the impact of gaze behaviour on cognitive and affective development in young infants.