Quantitative Analysis of Eye Movements during Singing of Early Childhood Children

Early childhood children tend to make musical expressions watching other children or the teacher’s piano accompaniment. However, it has not been inspected yet how eye movement is affected by music. To provide the optimized procedure to capture eye movement’s characteristics reflecting music, the statistical technique was used to evaluate effective parameters. In this study, eye trackers (Tobii Glasses 2) were used to acquire data of eye movements during musical expression of early childhood children and to conduct quantitative analysis. 3-year-old, 4-year-old, and 5-year-old children in two early childhood facilities (n=58) participated in eye-tracking while singing multiple songs of major and minor. This paper focuses on saccade (rapid eye movement) and gaze behaviors of early childhood children and mainly conducts, a three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the acquired data (age * facility*tonality). As a result, it was found that the number of occurrences of saccade and the total moving distances of saccade showed a statistical significance between means regarding differences in the tonality of major/minor key of songs, and childcare forms.