Relationship between ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) staff's years of professional experience and gaze patterns: A study using wearable eye trackers

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the relationship between ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) staff's years of professional experience and their gaze patterns during child care. We used wearable eye trackers (Tobii Pro Glasses 2) to quantify their gaze patterns, i.e., the number of looking at the children's face or other (i.e., non-face) areas. The results revealed that, during snack time, the more years of childcare experience the ECEC staff had, the longer they looked at other area than children's face area and the greater were the number of gazes. In contrast, the longer their childcare experience, the less they gazed at children's face, and the fewer were the number of gazes. Our findings may advance our understanding of the information processing of the expert ECEC staffs.