Empty-headed dynamical model of infant visual foraging.

Visual foraging is one important way that very young infants explore and learn about their environment. We recently showed that a simple stochastic dynamical model acts quantitatively like free-looking 1-month-old infants, even though it does not include any components that directly represent the perceptual-cognitive processes that operate on the input from visual foraging. This suggested that early in development, generic low-level processes like noise and hysteresis in the mechanisms controlling gaze may drive visual foraging behavior and therefore regulate the input to higher-level perceptual-cognitive processes that later come to have more influence on free looking. Here we evaluate the model's ability to behave like 3-month-olds studied under the same experimental conditions as 1-month-olds. The results show that the empty-headed model can also behave like 3-month-old infants, although not as well as 1-month-olds. Its partial success at 3 months suggests that generic low-level processes controlling gaze remain important in visual foraging. Its pattern of failure suggests that by 3 months time-dependent processes like attention have become especially important.