The way children view both social and nonsocial situations may be determined at least in part by their genes, a new study of identical and fraternal twins suggests.
Identical twins tend to look at the same parts of pictures, whether they depict children playing or an object, such as a musical instrument. Fraternal twins also show viewing patterns that are similar, but less so than identical twins. The gaze patterns of unrelated children are even less alike.
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[Researcher Dan] Kennedy and his colleagues used eye-tracking technology to monitor the gaze of 119 identical and 114 fraternal same-sex twin pairs. The children watched as photographs of social scenes such as children playing, and of objects such as road signs, appeared for three seconds on a screen. The team then created a ‘heat map’ from the eye-tracking data that charts the parts of each photo that caught the children’s attention.…
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The viewing patterns are most similar among identical twins. On a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 indicating exactly the same patterns, identical twin pairs scored an average of 0.6. Fraternal twins are also close, with a score of 0.56, and pairs of unrelated children had an average score of 0.54. Although these numbers seem similar, the differences are statistically significant.
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Kennedy says his next step is to study how individual differences in eye movements relate to differences in behavior and cognition.
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