Exploring Developmental Change in Ego-Motion Experience Across Infancy

Humans flexibly and intuitively use vision to plan and guide navigation through the local environment. How does this ability develop in infancy? One possibility is that the development of visual representations for navigation is driven by passive exposure to the visual statistics of scenes. Another possibility is that active navigation experience using vision to plan and guide locomotion is the driving factor. In order to distinguish between these two hypotheses, it is necessary to understand the nature of infants’ early visual scene experience itself. Surprisingly little prior work has characterized infants’ early experiences with ego-motion through scenes, before and after learning to locomote. We use ecological momentary assessments to quantify infants’ exposure to ego-motion through scenes, and how that changes with locomotor experience. We found that pre-crawling infants who have never independently navigated already experience significant passive visual exposure to forward-facing ego-motion through scenes. Nevertheless, this experience increases substantially with age and locomotor status.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Fuchs, Ariel

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Saxe, Rebecca
• Kamps, Frederik S.

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/156992

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/156992