Abstract / Summary
Abstract Individual differences in infants' face viewing—such as looking more or less at others' eyes—are commonly assumed to reflect variation in social cognition or social engagement. Here we show that in 7-month-old infants, looking patterns during face observation are strongly correlated with looking patterns for general objects (natural and man-made). In a follow-up experiment, we extended this finding to 3-month-old infants, indicating that these domain-general viewing tendencies emerge very early in development. Finally, in a third independent sample, we demonstrate that the effect generalizes to the second year of life and to naturalistic dynamic faces accompanied by speech and emotion. We found no association between individual differences in face viewing and socio-communicative ability. Collectively, the results suggest that domain-general visual sampling idiosyncrasies play a fundamental role in shaping individual differences in early face viewing and call for a re-evaluation of social accounts of individual differences in how infants view faces.