Looking This Way and That, and Learning to Adapt to the World

The findings provided by these eye-trackers so far (the first light enough for children to wear) suggest that infants may be more capable of understanding and acting on what they see than had been thought. “Quick gazes at obstacles in front of them or at their mothers’ faces may be all they need to get the information they want. They seem to be surprisingly efficient,” said John Franchak, a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at New York University.

Although vision might largely seem effortless to us, in reality we actively choose what we look at, making about two to four eye movements every second for some 150,000 motions daily, said Karen Adolph, also a developmental psychologist at N.Y.U. “Vision is not passive,” she said. “We actively coordinate our eye movements with the motions of our hands and bodies.”