Infants’ anticipatory eye movements: feature-based attention guides infants’ visual attention

When looking for an object, we identify it by selectively focusing our attention to a specific feature, known as feature-based attention. This basic attentional system has been reported in young children; however, little is known of whether infants could use feature-based attention. We have introduced a newly developed anticipation-looking task, where infants learned to direct their attention endogenously to a specific feature based on the learned feature (color or orientation), in 60 preverbal infants aged 7-8 months. We found that preverbal infants aged 7-8 months can direct their attention endogenously to the specific target feature among irrelevant features, thus showing the feature-based attentional selection. Experiment 2 bolstered this finding by demonstrating that infants directed their attention depending on the familiarized feature that belongs to a never-experienced object. These results that infants can form anticipation by color and orientation reflect they could drive their attention through feature-based selection.