Eye Tracking for Infant Populations: A Comparison of Methods and Best Practices: Eye Tracking for Infant Populations
Julia F. Aukerman, Jamie Newland, Lisa S. Scott · ACM Transactions on Applied Perception · 2025
Analyzing infant visual fixations and gaze patterns from the earliest stages of life can provide valuable insights into early cognition and development. Eye-tracking methodologies provide a means to measure infant visual perception with high temporal and spatial accuracy, and in increasingly naturalistic contexts with the innovation of head-mounted eye tracking. The current review provides a comparison between screen-based and head-mounted eye-tracking methods for use with infant populations, reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. This review also aims to summarize recommendations for best practices in infant eye tracking for both screen-based and head-mounted technology, including suggestions for designing experiments, calibration techniques, and analysis approaches. Moreover, we discuss the need for standardized procedures for experimental design and reporting data quality for investigations using eye tracking to examine infant development.