Abstract
We investigated the possibility that a range of social stimuli capture the attention of 6-month-old infants when in competition with other non-face objects. Infants viewed a series of six-item arrays in which one target item was a face, body part, or animal as their eye movements were recorded. Stimulus arrays were also processed for relative salience of each item in terms of color, luminance, and amount of contour. Targets were rarely the most visually salient items in the arrays, yet infants' first looks toward all three target types were above chance, and dwell times for targets exceeded other stimulus types. Girls looked longer at faces than did boys, but there were no sex differences for other stimuli. These results are interpreted in a context of learning to discriminate between different classes of animate stimuli, perhaps in line with affordances for social interaction, and origins of sex differences in social attention.
Highlights
We investigated the possibility that a range of social stimuli capture the attention of 6-month-old infants when in competition with other non-face objects
To examine in greater detail the face-specific account as it pertains to infancy, we investigated 6-month-olds’ attentional capture by three types of stimulus
A second motivation for our approach stems from the possibility of sex differences in social attention to non-face stimuli
Summary
We investigated the possibility that a range of social stimuli capture the attention of 6-month-old infants when in competition with other non-face objects. Inversion impaired performance with human faces to a greater extent than animal faces, consistent with past research demonstrating important contributions of configural information to face recognition (e.g., Farah et al, 1995) Taken together, these studies provide evidence that for adults, as for infants, faces capture attention in complex arrays of distracter objects under some circumstances, yet they fail to reveal the sources of these effects: experience, familiarity, and expertise, or visual properties of the objects themselves
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