Perception of goal-directed motion in infants and adults: eye-tracking experiments and computational model.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birgit Träuble
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2012 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 226933759

The current project investigates the perception of goal-directed motion through a combination of eye-tracking experiments and computational modelling. We want to find out to what degree perceptual/conceptual and domain-specific/domain-general factors influence the detection of goal-directed motion in adults and infants. Eye-tracking and computational modelling will allow us to avoid many pitfalls encountered in previous research. Instead of asking subjects for explicit judgments we test their implicit performance by measuring their eye movements in a dynamic chase-detection task. Instead of setting up a model based on a priori assumptions, we data-mine adult´s eye movements and thereby obtain a formal account of bottom-up mechanisms involved in the perception of goal-directed motion. Instead of asking whether infants do or do not show a particular competence at a particular age, we quantify infants´ eye movement behaviour during free-viewing of the chasing motion with the help of adult model and contrast its explanatory power with that of domain-general saliency models across different age groups. Thus, we aim to minimize the influence of researcher´s hypotheses on the subjects´ performance, data evaluation, and interpretation that often plagues the discussions of origins and features of human social competences.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Sabina Pauen