Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sustained visual attention is crucial to many developmentaloutcomes. We demonstrate that, consistent with thedevelopmental systems view, sustained visual attentionemerges from and is tightly tied to sensory motor coordination.We examined whether changes in manual behavior altertoddlers’ eye gaze by giving one group of children heavy toysthat were hard to pick up, while giving another group ofchildren perceptually identical toys that were lighter, easy topick up and hold. We found a tight temporal coupling betweenthe dynamics of visual attention and the dynamics of manualactivities on objects, a relation that cannot be explained byinterest alone. In the Heavy condition, toddlers looked atobjects just as much as did toddlers in the Light condition butdid so through many brief glances, whereas in Light conditionlooks to the objects were longer and sustained. We discuss theimplication of hand-eye coordination in the development ofvisual attention.