Lisboa, Isabel C. and Serra, Juliana and Kaduk, Katharina and Pereira, Alfredo F. and Reid, Vincent M. (2026) Visual preferences for biological motion following the stepping reflex in five-month-old infants. European Journal of Developmental Psychology. ISSN 1740-5629
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Selecting where to look is one of the primary tools for active learning about the world during infancy. Despite this, the specific determinants of infant visual attention and perceptual preferences remain to be fully elucidated. In the present study, we measured the association between the infants’ active experience of stepping and their visual attention to human walking. We induced the stepping reflex in five-month-old infants (N = 57, n = 51) and measured their preference towards a coherent point-light walker in contrast with a scrambled control. At the group level, infants did not show a reliable preference for the coherent walker. However, at the individual level, step frequency significantly predicted the proportion of looking to the coherent walker.This association did not significantly differed by gender, although exploratory simple-slopes estimates suggested a positive association in females and a near-zero slope in males. Taken together, these results are consistent with the possibility that variability in elicited locomotor activity relates to individual differences in attention to coherent point-light walkers prior to the onset of independent walking. Future work should combine neuroimaging with kinematic measures of stepping quality to clarify how the elicited locomotor activity relates to a preferential attention to biological motion.