Project LEECHI

Learning From the Environment Through the Eyes of Children

In the past, most studies have relied on observations in the lab or home environment, interviews with caregivers, third-person reported questionnaire surveys, or highly controlled experiments. While these traditional methods have provided important insights into children’s development, they ignore the complexity of the natural environment and the active role children play in their own learning and development.

In contexts such as classrooms or play time, children can select where to allocate their attention to sample information, guided by situational contexts (e.g., saliency) and individual characteristics (e.g., prior knowledge, curiosity). This top-down way of processing information is essential for children to learn from and interact with the environment.

Guided by this postulation, we will use head-mounted cameras and eye trackers to record children’s egocentric view of the naturalistic world. Furthermore, instead of relying on the labor-intensive manual coding of the recorded video, we will use modern AI models to code the video automatically. In addition, we will collect data from multiple surveys and naturalistic experiments to capture children’s individual differences. We will specifically look into three aspects of children’s interaction with the environment:

1. children’s eye gaze pattern during free play and their relation to individual differences in their motor skills, temperament, attachment style, trait curiosity, hyperactivity and inattention, cognitive control, social and emotional development, language development, and memory.
2. the relation between children’s individual differences (as measured in the first aspect) with the quality of the home environment.
3. The coupling between children’s and parents’ sampled information and experiences during free-play interaction, and to examine to what extent these patterns may predict children’s memory of the sampled information over time.

Selected publications

• Liang, Y., Blaser, E., Yi, J. Y., Sai, L., & Kaldy, Z. (2025). The extended mind in young children: Cost-dependent trade-off between external and internal memory. Psychol. Sci. 36(1), 19–34. doi: 10.1177/09567976241306424
• McKay, C., Shing, Y. L., Rafetseder, E., &Wijeakumar, S. (2021). Home assessment of visual working memory in pre-schoolers reveals associations between behavior, brain activation and parent reports of life stress. Developmental Science, e13094. doi: 10.1111/desc.13094
• Schuck, N.W., Li, A.X., Wenke, D., Ay, D. S., Loewe, A., Gaschler, R., Shing, Y. L. (2022). Spontaneous discovery of novel task solutions in children. PLoS ONE 17(5): e0266253. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266253