Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Measuring selective sustained attention (SSA) development in preschool-aged children has been difficult due to challengesin designing age-appropriate measurement paradigms. The TrackIt task, together with eye-tracking and a recently pro-posed Bayesian-model based eye-tracking analysis method, creates opportunity for fine-grained measurement of SSA inyoung children. The current study 1) provides the first rigorous validation of this method by comparing model judgmentswith human video-coding of the data, and 2) further explores potential uses of this method for providing nuanced measuresof SSA. More specifically, we use the analysis method to explore different ways of characterizing SSA based on eye-gazedata obtained during TrackIt with 3- to 6-year old children. We look at patterns of in-trial eye-gazing across age and acrosstime.