/ 27 May 2011

Babies’ eyes might tell us a lot

Anyone who has ever spent hours trying to work out whether a screaming baby is hungry, tired, soiled or just whingeing for the TV to be switched on to an episode of In The Night Garden will agree that the little ‘uns aren’t the easiest people to communicate with. For parents that is often frustrating. But for doctors it impedes their ability to make diagnoses, particularly in areas related to attention, communication and language development.

But researchers from Britain’s University of East London are working on a cutting-edge way to tackle the issue. They are using the latest eye-tracking technology in local children’s centres to see whether it is possible to identify attention deficiency and communication development problems in babies as young as six months.

With studies suggesting that 10% of British children suffer from language difficulties by the time they start school, Professor Derek Moore, the lead researcher at the university’s institute for research in child development, says the findings could have a significant impact on children, schools and local communities.

He uses an apparently normal computer monitor with infrared eyetrackers built in to record babies’ eye movements. The eye trackers pick up reflections from the eye and provide precise measurements of where the babies are looking on the screen as they watch video clips of speaking faces and moving objects.

The technology is used in a range of scientific fields and in commerce. Market researchers use eye trackers to work out which parts of websites, adverts and newspapers best draw readers’ attention, for example. Recent updates to the eye-tracking devices have made it possible to use them with young child­ren to investigate how much of their surroundings they take in.

“Newer equipment is less sensitive to head movements, so [are] ideal for use with babies,” says Moore. “It’s very powerful — you can immediately play back a video showing a trace of where the baby looked from moment to moment, plus contour maps showing where they looked most overall.”

The university study, which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, will run for three years, monitoring the children and checking whether the data ­collected accurately reflects any emerging difficulties when they begin to talk.

So far, Moore says, the first parents to enrol their children in the trials have been surprised by how much their babies notice on the computer screens. “Quite a few parents are amazed to see how good their babies were at controlling where they were looking,” he says. “Many have little idea about how able their baby is, but this technology engages them and this study begins to harness this enthusiasm.”

The early parts of the research — which also involves academics from the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London — have shown that babies are not always most interested in the things that best engage adult attention spans.

In one of the eye-tracking tasks, Moore presented groups of six pictures, including many common objects, to the babies. Before the experiment took place, several of the parents told him they expected their child to focus on the picture of a mobile phone, believing it was this that would most hold their interest. That wasn’t the case. In fact, Moore says, most of the babies far prefer looking at pictures of faces, and clocks come a close second.

The academic hopes the findings will enable speech and development experts to work on early screening and help that will enable babies born in some of the United Kingdom’s most deprived areas to enter school with an equal chance of success.

“The eye-tracking technology means that we can now do work on early responses to social and speech stimuli and it’s portable enough to take this technology into the heart of communities,” Moore says.

“A diverse range of families from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds and speaking a wide variety of languages are involved in the study at children’s centres in Tower Hamlets and Newham, east London.

If we can identify weakness or difficulties and set up programmes of intervention earlier here, this will allow general practitioners to refer infants to specialists earlier and will mean that children entering school will already have had the opportunity to receive targeted educational help. That will improve the quality of life for children, their families and communities.”

If his research pays off, Moore hopes eye-tracking technology could eventually be a part of the usual screening techniques paediatric doctors and developmental psychology specialists use with young children. “In this way we could have a significant positive impact by reducing the proportion of children presenting with problems at entry to school,” he says.

For the cash-strapped National Health Service, Moore hopes eye-tracking tests could also result in big savings, despite the necessary early investment in technology. He points out that research in both the United States and the UK suggests spending money on early intervention in child­ren’s health can trigger tenfold returns in cost savings.

“Ultimately eye-tracking measures could be used as part of a toolkit for identifying potential language and social perception problems even before children start speaking,” Moore says. “If this technology can be rapidly and effectively integrated into children’s centres then this could have significant long-term health and educational implications.” —