Asymmetry in infants' selective attention to facial features during visual processing of infant-directed speech.

Nicholas A Smith,Colleen R Gibilisco,Rachel E Meisinger,Maren Hankey

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00601

Abstract

Two experiments used eye tracking to examine how infant and adult observers distribute their eye gaze on videos of a mother producing infant- and adult-directed speech. Both groups showed greater attention to the eyes than to the nose and mouth, as well as an asymmetrical focus on the talker's right eye for infant-directed speech stimuli. Observers continued to look more at the talker's apparent right eye when the video stimuli were mirror flipped, suggesting that the asymmetry reflects a perceptual processing bias rather than a stimulus artifact, which may be related to cerebral lateralization of emotion processing.

Highlights

Interaction between caregivers and infants is a complex, bidirectional phenomenon (Cohn and Tronick, 1988; Fogel et al, 1999)
Eye tracking samples were reduced to categorical labels corresponding to the four facial feature regions of interests (ROIs), and the proportions of samples falling within each ROI were calculated for each trial
If the asymmetry observed in Experiment 1 were due to some property of the talker’s right eye, we would expect a reversal of the gaze asymmetry in the mirror-flipped condition

Summary

Introduction

Interaction between caregivers and infants is a complex, bidirectional phenomenon (Cohn and Tronick, 1988; Fogel et al, 1999). This interaction is embodied in the form of a complex combination of dynamic expressions and movements of the face and body, including a characteristic infant-directed (ID) style of speech with distinctive multisensory properties. Perceptual studies in infants have shown a strong preference for ID speech, (Fernald, 1985; Cooper and Aslin, 1990; Pegg et al, 1992; Werker et al, 1994), and infants’ responses have an influence on mothers’ speech production during interaction (Smith and Trainor, 2008). ID speech is a interesting stimulus because it conveys both phonetic (Kuhl et al, 1997; Burnham et al, 2002), prosodic (Fernald and Mazzie, 1991) and emotional information (Trainor et al, 2000; Spence and Moore, 2002), adapted to the infant’s developmental state

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