Abstract
Vision is one of the most valuable tools of non-verbal communication in terms of the accuracy and speed with which information is conveyed, in addition to the amount of communication delivered in an instant. In daily clinical practice, pedodontists use their eyes to relax child patients in the chair. As a matter of fact, however, it is very difficult for the dentists to judge how much the children understand what the operators meant via the eye.
In the present experiment, we tried to find out what characteristics there are in the way child patients look at the dentist. Using a Visicon eye camera, analyses were performed on the eye movements of the young subjects when they saw a photograph of the face of a dentist who was looking straight ahead. Since there were wide differences in eye movement between the age groups of under 6 and over 6 years, the subjects were grouped into two-those aged under 6 and those aged 6 and over-for comparative analysis.
The findings of our study are as follows:
1) As for eye movement, differences were noted between the age groups in the scanning range of the eyes, the saccadic eye movements from one fixation point to another and the direction in which the subjects turned their gaze.
2) The younger group was limited in the visual range and the older group scanned a wider area.
3) The saccadic eye movements in changing the point of fixation was smaller in the children under 6 years old than the children aged 6 and over.
4) As for the direction of the gaze, the number of those in the younger group who tended to move their eyes horizontally was the largest, followed by those who moved their eyes in diagonal directions.
