Face Experience and the Attentional Bias for Fearful Expressions in 6- and 9-Month-Old Infants.

Kristina Safar,Andrea Kusec,Margaret C Moulson

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01575

Abstract

Infants demonstrate an attentional bias toward fearful facial expressions that emerges in the first year of life. The current study investigated whether this attentional bias is influenced by experience with particular face types. Six-month-old (n = 33) and 9-month-old (n = 31) Caucasian infants' spontaneous preference for fearful facial expressions when expressed by own-race (Caucasian) or other-race (East Asian) faces was examined. Six-month-old infants showed a preference for fearful expressions when expressed by own-race faces, but not when expressed by other-race faces. Nine-month-old infants showed a preference for fearful expressions when expressed by both own-race faces and other-race faces. These results suggest that how infants deploy their attention to different emotional expressions is shaped by experience: Attentional biases might initially be restricted to faces with which infants have the most experience, and later be extended to faces with which they have less experience.

Highlights

Faces are an important part of the infant’s social world
The current study is the first to investigate whether experience with own- and other-race faces influences how infants deploy their attention to different facial expressions at 6 and 9 months of age
Six-month-old infants demonstrated a looking preference for fearful facial expressions compared to happy facial expressions when expressed by own-race faces, but not when expressed by other-race faces

Summary

Introduction

Faces are an important part of the infant’s social world. newborns display preferences for face-like stimuli (Johnson et al, 1991; Turati et al, 2002) and rudimentary face discrimination ability (Pascalis et al, 1995), their face processing ability undergoes significant development during the first year of life. Three-month-old infants show a preference for female over male faces, unless they have a male primary caregiver (Quinn et al, 2002), and a preference for own-race over other-race faces, whereas newborn infants do not (Kelly et al, 2005) These attentional biases are almost certainly driven by greater exposure to female and own-race faces early in the first year of life (Rennels and Davis, 2008; Sugden et al, 2014). These preferences change over the first year of life: by 9 months, infants show a preference for other-race compared to own-race faces, perhaps because as infants become more efficient at processing own-race faces, they begin to pay more attention to the novel, other-race faces (Liu et al, 2015)

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