Prerna Aneja ^1* Thomas Kinna ¹ Jacob Newman ¹ Saber Sami ¹ Joe Cassidy ¹ Jordan McCarthy ¹ Madhuri Tiwari ² Aarti Kumar ² John Spencer ^1*

• ¹ University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
• ² Community Empowerment Lab, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

Caregiver-infant interactions shape infants' early visual experience; however, there is limited work from low-and middle-income countries (LMIC) in characterising the visual cognitive dynamics of these interactions. Here, we present an innovative dyadic visual cognition pipeline using machine learning methods which captures, processes, and analyses the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interactions across cultures. We undertake two studies to examine its application in both low (rural India) and high (urban UK) resource settings. Study 1 develops and validates the pipeline to process caregiver-infant interaction data captured using head-mounted cameras and eye-trackers. We use face detection and object recognition networks and validate these tools using 12 caregiver-infant dyads (4 dyads from a 6-month-old UK cohort, 4 dyads from a 6-month-old India cohort, and 4 dyads from a 9-month-old India cohort). Resultsshow robust and accurate face and toy detection, as well as a high percent agreement between processed and manually coded dyadic interactions. Study 2 applied the pipeline to a larger data set (25 6-month-olds from the UK, 31 6-month-olds from India, and 37 9-month-olds from India) with the aim of comparing the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interaction across the two cultural settings. Results show remarkable correspondence between key measures of visual exploration across cultures, including longer mean look durations during infant-led joint attention episodes. In addition, we found several differences across cultures. Most notably, infants in the UK had a higher proportion of infant-led joint attention episodes consistent with a child-centred view of parenting common in western middle-class families. In summary, the pipeline we report provides an objective assessment tool to quantify the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interaction across high-and low-resource settings.