Children and Adults Show a Common Attention Bias for Object Tops and Scene Bottoms

What is it about?

This study confirms that a visual perceptual bias to favor attending to object tops and scene bottoms extend from adults to 4–7-year-olds children. The findings support that both groups attend more to their interactive space near their arms and legs, below eye height. This supports a common Vertical Attention Bias (VAB) coupled to a general downward vantage, largely independent of age, body size, and cognitive growth, which could help designers optimize learning environment layouts.

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Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The findings are consistent with ecological theory in that observers generally favor a downward gaze and focus attention on the informative aspects of the environment. Given a gravitationally centric world, objects are typically anchored to the ground, and the means by which we interact—arms, torso, and legs—are typically below eye height. This information imbalance in the distribution leads observers to couple their expectations to their action space, interacting more with object tops and scene bottoms. Through these repeated interactions, perceptual expectations result in a vertical attention bias. The principal findings support that despite age and body size differences, 4-7 year old children’s perceptual system is already largely attuned to the affordances in their individual interactive space.

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