What Do Young Infants Do During Eye-Tracking Experiments? IP-BET - A Coding Scheme for Quantifying Spontaneous Infant and Parent Behaviour.

Eye-tracking measurement of looking is the fundamental method in infancy research. Over the last few decades it has provided many of the most significant discoveries in developmental psychology. Infants engage in looking tasks and use their bodies for learning differently from adults, yet, the breadth of their behavioural repertoire and the constraints that the testing situation places on them remain under-explored. Young infants are tested in close physical proximity to their parent, interact during the experiment and rely on the parent to stay engaged in the task. Infants may also engage a different set of skills (e.g. when self-regulating) to perform the very same looking tasks in comparison with adult participants. We devised a coding scheme to systematically analyse task-relevant (attention to the screen) and extraneous behaviours [body movement, self-touch, non-nutritive sucking (NNS), affect] that infants exhibit during an eye-tracking session. We also measured parental behaviours (attention to the screen or the child), including dyadic interactions with the infant (talking, physical contact). We outline the rationale for the scheme and present descriptive data on the behaviour of a large group of typical 5- and 6-month-olds (