Infants’ ability to attend actively and selectively to naturalistic
stimuli is critical to early learning. Most studies on infant visual
attention use screen-based paradigms wherein infants view
stimuli on computer screens. Little is known about how infants
observe others’ activities in everyday contexts. Using head-
mounted eye-tracking, this study examined how infants
distributed attention when observing their parents perform an
everyday task – making peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches –
in a home-like environment. Infant observers attended to
parents’ activities less than adult observers in the same
situation. However, when infants were engaged in action
observation, their gaze patterns were distributed on task-
relevant objects similarly to adult observers, suggesting they
actively obtained rich visual input in this free-viewing
situation. Moreover, infant-parent dyads coordinated visual
attention during the food preparation task in similar ways as
observed in other everyday tasks, such as toy play, suggesting
sensorimotor processes play a critical role in coordinated
attention.