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' (
The present study explored behavioral norms for infant social attention in typically developing human and nonhuman primate infants. We examined the normative development of attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli longitudinally in macaques (
- Award ID(s):
- 1653737
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10456564
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Psychobiology
- Volume:
- 62
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0012-1630
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 841-857
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract N = 65) visual scanning of complex image arrays with human and animal faces varying in eye contact and head orientation. Across all ages, infants displayed superior detection of faces with eye contact; however, this effect varied as a function of species and head orientation. Infants were more attentive to human than animal faces and were more sensitive to eye and head orientation for human faces compared to animal faces. Unexpectedly, human faces with both averted heads and eyes received the most attention. This pattern may reflect the early emergence of gaze following—the ability to look where another individual looks—which begins to develop around this age. Infants may be especially interested in averted gaze faces, providing early scaffolding for joint attention. This study represents the first investigation to document infants' attention patterns to faces systematically varying in their attentional states. Together, these findings suggest that infants develop early, specialized functional conspecific face detection. -
more » « less
Abstract In childhood, higher levels of temperamental fear—an early‐emerging proclivity to distress in the face of novelty—are associated with lower social responsivity and greater social anxiety. While the early emergence of temperamental fear in infancy is poorly understood, it is theorized to be driven by individual differences in reactivity and self‐regulation to novel stimuli. The current study used eye tracking to capture infants’ (
N = 124) reactions to a video of a smiling stranger—a common social encounter—including infant gaze aversions from the stranger's face (indexing arousal regulation) and pupil dilation (indexing physiological reactivity), longitudinally at 2, 4, 6, and 8 months of age. Multilevel mixed‐effects models indicated that more fearful infants took more time to look away from a smiling stranger's face than less fearful infants, suggesting that high‐fear infants may have slower arousal regulation. At 2 and 4 months, more fearful infants also exhibited greater and faster pupil dilation before gaze aversions, consistent with greater physiological reactivity. Together, these findings suggest that individual differences in infants’ gaze aversions and pupil dilation can index the development of fearful temperament in early infancy, facilitating the identification of, and interventions for, risk factors to social disruptions. -
Remote eye tracking with automated corneal reflection provides insights into the emergence and development of cognitive, social, and emotional functions in human infants and non-human primates. However, because most eye-tracking systems were designed for use in human adults, the accuracy of eye-tracking data collected in other populations is unclear, as are potential approaches to minimize measurement error. For instance, data quality may differ across species or ages, which are necessary considerations for comparative and developmental studies. Here we examined how the calibration method and adjustments to areas of interest (AOIs) of the Tobii TX300 changed the mapping of fixations to AOIs in a cross-species longitudinal study. We tested humans (N = 119) at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 14 months of age and macaques (Macaca mulatta; N = 21) at 2 weeks, 3 weeks, and 6 months of age. In all groups, we found improvement in the proportion of AOI hits detected as the number of successful calibration points increased, suggesting calibration approaches with more points may be advantageous. Spatially enlarging and temporally prolonging AOIs increased the number of fixation-AOI mappings, suggesting improvements in capturing infants’ gaze behaviors; however, these benefits varied across age groups and species, suggesting different parameters may be ideal, depending on the population studied. In sum, to maximize usable sessions and minimize measurement error, eye-tracking data collection and extraction approaches may need adjustments for the age groups and species studied. Doing so may make it easier to standardize and replicate eye-tracking research findings.more » « less
-
The slow emergence of gaze‐ and point‐following: A longitudinal study of infants from 4 to 12 monthsmore » « less
Abstract Acquisition of visual attention‐following skills, notably gaze‐ and point‐following, contributes to infants' ability to share attention with caregivers, which in turn contributes to social learning and communication. However, the development of gaze‐ and point‐following in the first 18 months remains controversial, in part because of different testing protocols and standards. To address this, we longitudinally tested
N = 43 low‐risk, North American middle‐class infants' tendency to follow gaze direction, pointing gestures, and gaze‐and‐point combinations. Infants were tested monthly from 4 to 12 months of age. To control motivational differences, infants were taught to expect contingent reward videos in the target locations. No‐cue trials were included to estimate spontaneous target fixation rates. A comparison sample (N = 23) was tested at 9 and 12 months to estimate practice effects. Results showed gradual increases in both gaze‐ and point‐following starting around 7 months, and modest month‐to‐month individual stability from 8 to 12 months. However, attention‐following did not exceed chance levels until after 6 months. Infants rarely followed cues to locations behind them, even at 12 months. Infants followed combined gaze‐and‐point cues more than gaze alone, and followed points at intermediate levels (not reliably different from the other cues). The comparison group's results showed that practice effects did not explain the age‐related increase in attention‐following. The results corroborate and extend previous findings that North American middle‐class infants' attention‐following in controlled laboratory settings increases slowly and incrementally between 6 and 12 months of age.Research Highlights A longitudinal experimental study documented the emergence and developmental trajectories of North American middle‐class infants' visual attention‐following skills, including gaze‐following, point‐following, and gaze‐and‐point‐following.
A new paradigm controlled for factors including motivation, attentiveness, and visual‐search baserates. Motor development was ruled out as a predictor or limiter of the emergence of attention‐following.
Infants did not follow attention reliably until after 6 months, and following increased slowly from 7 to 12 months.
Infants' individual trajectories showed modest month‐to‐month stability from 8 to 12 months of age.
-
more » « less
Abstract Infants’ early gaze alternations are one of their first steps towards a sophisticated understanding of the social world. This ability, to gaze alternate between an object of interest and another individual also attending to that object, has been considered foundational to the development of many complex social‐cognitive abilities, such as theory of mind and language. However, to understand the evolution of these abilities, it is important to identify whether and how gaze alternations are used and develop in our closest living relatives, bonobos (
Pan paniscus ) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ). Here, we evaluated the development of gaze alternations in a large, developmental sample of bonobos (N = 17) and chimpanzees (N = 35). To assess the flexibility of ape gaze alternations, we tested whether they produced gaze alternations when requesting food from a human who was either visually attentive or visually inattentive. Similarly to human infants, both bonobos and chimpanzees produced gaze alternations, and did so more frequently when a human communicative partner was visually attentive. However, unlike humans, who gaze alternate frequently from early in development, chimpanzees did not begin to gaze alternate frequently until adulthood. Bonobos produced very few gaze alternations, regardless of age. Thus, it may be the early emergence of gaze alternations, as opposed gaze alternations themselves, that is derived in the human lineage. The distinctively early emergence of gaze alternations in humans may be a critical underpinning for the development of complex human social‐cognitive abilities.
