Children’s attention to social partners in a crowded, dynamically changing natural environment

A child’s first step towards social interaction begins with attention to desired social partners, typically by focusing on the partner’s face. While laboratory studies using static images of people’s faces suggest that children look more at adult than child faces, such paradigms fail to capture the dynamic, reciprocal nature of real-world social interactions. In the current study, using mobile headmounted eyetrackers, we examined children’s attention to adults’ and children’s faces as they navigated a crowded room with a naturally changing number of adults and children. Our results reveal that children exhibit a preference for adult over child faces, with a bias towards female faces, and surprisingly, they attend more to unfamiliar than familiar faces. Together, these results reveal the flexible context-sensitive strategies that children use to navigate their daily interactions, and document how social attention unfolds in dynamic social settings.