Attentional bias assessed by a facial expression cuing paradigm in infants

Atsuko Nakagawa,Masune Sukigara

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-36806-1

Atsuko Nakagawa, Masune Sukigara

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-36806-1

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Jan 11, 2019
Citations: 9	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Nagoya City University

Abstract

To disambiguate infants’ attentional bias towards fearful facial expressions, we applied a facial expression cueing paradigm to 36 6-month-old and 33 12-month-old infants, with 21 infants taking part at both ages. Infants made saccades towards a peripheral target preceded by a happy, fearful, or neutral cue directing their attention to the target location (congruent) or the wrong location (incongruent). The results show that infants were faster to respond when shown a fearful (vs. happy) face as a congruent cue, which is consistent with previous studies referring to fearful vigilance, while an incongruent fearful cue reduces attention shifts to the target on the opposite side of the monitor to a greater extent than an incongruent happy cue at 12 months, implying that a fearful facial expression prolongs attentional disengagement or is associated with a greater narrowing of attention. Additionally, the latencies of 6-month-olds were significantly faster than those of 12-month-olds in a congruent condition. The relationship between attentional bias and temperamental disposition was examined using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire–Revised. High temperamental orienting scores partly correlated with attentional bias at 12 months. The contributions of attentional brain networks to socio-cognitive and emotional development are also discussed.

Highlights

Attentional bias related to threat or fearfulness has been reported as either a rapid orientation towards fearful stimuli or slow disengagement from fearful stimuli[1]
Combined with the findings of Peltola et al.[10], attention-orienting brain network in the first year may be associated with the efficiency of executive attention or effortful control mediated through attachment formation
This study applied a spatial cuing paradigm to test whether different facial expressions affect attentional orientating and disengagement in 6- and 12-month-old infants

Summary

Introduction

Attentional bias related to threat or fearfulness has been reported as either a rapid orientation towards fearful stimuli or slow disengagement from fearful stimuli[1]. While these biases are typically detected as behavioural reaction time responses in adults and older children, they have been shown to be present during infancy (for reviews, see[2,3]). Using eye-tracking technology, 8- to 14-month-olds were found to turn more quickly to threatening than to non-threatening stimuli in a visual search task in which they were presented with various stimuli[4] This appears to constitute an orienting advantage towards threat. It is suggested that the orienting attention system in infancy responds differently to non-threatening and threatening (fearful) stimuli[17]

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