Humans detect faces efficiently from a young age. Face detection is critical for infants to identify and learn from relevant social stimuli in their environments. Faces with eye contact are an especially salient stimulus, and attention to the eyes in infancy is linked to the emergence of later sociality. Despite the importance of both of these early social skills—attending to faces and attending to the eyes—surprisingly little is known about how they interact. We used eye tracking to explore whether eye contact influences infants' face detection. Longitudinally, we examined 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐month‐olds' (
From birth, human and nonhuman primates attend more to faces with direct gaze compared with averted gaze, and previous studies report that attention to the eyes is linked to the emergence of later social skills. Here, we explored whether early experiences influence attraction to eye contact in infant macaques by examining their attention to face pairs varying in their gaze direction across the first 13 weeks of life. Infants raised by human caretakers had limited conspecific interactions (nursery‐reared;
- Award ID(s):
- 1653737
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10078541
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Psychobiology
- Volume:
- 61
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0012-1630
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 228-238
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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