Dynamic Advances in Emotion Processing: Differential Attention towards the Critical Features of Dynamic Emotional Expressions in 7-Month-Old Infants.

Shira C Segal,Margaret C Moulson

doi:10.3390/brainsci10090585

Abstract

Infants’ visual processing of emotion undergoes significant development across the first year of life, yet our knowledge regarding the mechanisms underlying these advances is limited. Additionally, infant emotion processing is commonly examined using static faces, which do not accurately depict real-world emotional displays. The goal of this study was to characterize 7-month-olds’ visual scanning strategies when passively viewing dynamic emotional expressions to examine whether infants modify their scanning patterns depending on the emotion. Eye-tracking measures revealed differential attention towards the critical features (eyes, mouth) of expressions. The eyes captured the greatest attention for angry and neutral faces, and the mouth captured the greatest attention for happy faces. A time-course analysis further elucidated at what point during the trial differential scanning patterns emerged. The current results suggest that 7-month-olds are sensitive to the critical features of emotional expressions and scan them differently depending on the emotion. The scanning patterns presented in this study may serve as a link to understanding how infants begin to differentiate between expressions in the context of emotion recognition.

Highlights

The ability to process and recognize emotions is critical in guiding successful interactions with other individuals [1]
The sample size was determined by a power analysis using G*Power 3 software (Version 3.1.9.3, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany) [41], to ensure sufficient power to detect a medium effect in the within-between analysis of variance (ANOVA) interaction
The results from this study suggest that by 7 months of age, infants differentially allocate attention to facial features depending on the emotional expression

Summary

Introduction

The ability to process and recognize emotions is critical in guiding successful interactions with other individuals [1]. Learning to orient attention to faces and to process facial expressions are all part of the skill set required by infants for communicating with caregivers and navigating their social environment [2]. Emotion recognition is a foundational skill that supports decoding social cues and understanding complex social interactions [4]. By 5 to months, infants begin to exhibit more sophisticated abilities with respect to decoding the underlying affective information being portrayed in various emotional expressions. Infants of this age demonstrate the ability to identify multiple representations of the same emotion as part of a cohesive category [6] and are able to detect a common emotion across visual and auditory stimuli

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