Exploring Developmental Change in Ego-Motion Experience Across Infancy

Abstract

Humans flexibly and intuitively use vision to plan and guide navigation through the local environment. How does this ability develop in infancy? One possibility is that the development of visual representations for navigation is driven by passive exposure to the visual statistics of scenes. Another possibility is that active navigation experience using vision to plan and guide locomotion is the driving factor. In order to distinguish between these two hypotheses, it is necessary to understand the nature of infants’ early visual scene experience itself. Surprisingly little prior work has characterized infants’ early experiences with ego-motion through scenes, before and after learning to locomote. We use ecological momentary assessments to quantify infants’ exposure to ego-motion through scenes, and how that changes with locomotor experience. We found that pre-crawling infants who have never independently navigated already experience significant passive visual exposure to forward-facing ego-motion through scenes. Nevertheless, this experience increases substantially with age and locomotor status.