Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In crowded and cluttered environments, infants can reduce visualclutter by using manual actions to bring objects closer to the eyes,what we refer to as hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordinationis therefore hypothesized to be an important ability for controllingand distributing attention. Little is known about how the emergingability to integrate both gaze and manual actions onto objectsimpacts how attention is distributed. Twenty-five infantsparticipated in a naturalistic toy play session that included 24 toys.Overall, infants generated distributions of attention that were right-skewed, reflecting coherence: a composition of selectivity of a fewhighly-frequent toys and exploration of many less-frequent toys. Weobserved that individual differences in hand-eye coordinationimpacted distributions of attention, with infants displaying lowhand-eye coordination having dramatically less coherentdistributions of visual attention during bouts of hand-eyecoordination. These results suggest that hand-eye coordination is acritical pathway for visual attention.