Eye tracking in developmental cognitive neuroscience – The good, the bad and the ugly

Roy S. Hessels*, Ignace T.C. Hooge

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Eye tracking is a popular research tool in developmental cognitive neuroscience for studying the development of perceptual and cognitive processes. However, eye tracking in the context of development is also challenging. In this paper, we ask how knowledge on eye-tracking data quality can be used to improve eye-tracking recordings and analyses in longitudinal research so that valid conclusions about child development may be drawn. We answer this question by adopting the data-quality perspective and surveying the eye-tracking setup, training protocols, and data analysis of the YOUth study (investigating neurocognitive development of 6000 children). We first show how our eye-tracking setup has been optimized for recording high-quality eye-tracking data. Second, we show that eye-tracking data quality can be operator-dependent even after a thorough training protocol. Finally, we report distributions of eye-tracking data quality measures for four age groups (5 months, 10 months, 3 years, and 9 years), based on 1531 recordings. We end with advice for (prospective) developmental eye-tracking researchers and generalizations to other methodologies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100710
JournalDevelopmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume40
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2019

Funding

Author RH was supported by the Consortium on Individual Development (CID). CID is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the NWO (Grant No. 024.001.003 ). The authors thank Jessica Heeman and Paul Beuk ( http://www.paulbeuk.nl/ ) for the development and construction of the eye-tracking setup described in this article, Ron Scholten for help with data management, and Chantal Kemner and Yentl de Kloe for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Finally, the authors thank the many parents, caregivers and children that have volunteered for the YOUth study and the entire staff at the KinderKennisCentrum for making the measurements possible.

Keywords

  • Data analysis
  • Data quality
  • Development
  • Eye tracking
  • Longitudinal

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