Abstract
Faces are an important source of social signal throughout the lifespan. In adults, they have a prioritized access to the orienting system. Here we investigate when this effect emerges during development. We tested 139 children, early adolescents, adolescents and adults in a mixed pro- and anti-saccades task with faces, cars or noise patterns as visual targets. We observed an improvement in performance until about 15 years of age, replicating studies that used only meaningless stimuli as targets. Also, as previously reported, we observed that adults made more direction errors to faces than abstract patterns and cars. The children showed this effect too with regards to noise patterns but it was not specific since performance for cars and faces did not differ. The adolescents, in contrast, made more errors for faces than for cars but as many errors for noise patterns and faces. In all groups latencies for pro-saccades were faster towards faces. We discuss these findings with regards to the development of executive control in childhood and adolescence and the influence of social stimuli at different ages.
Highlights
Faces are an important source of social signal throughout the lifespan
They performed a mixed pro- and anti-saccades task, where the target stimulus was either a face, a car or a noise pattern, all equalized for low-level properties
We first concentrated on our two main hypotheses and analysed two parameters that have been shown to be influenced by stimulus category in adults and to change with age: (i) antisaccades direction error rate reflects the ability to inhibit the automatic response and reprogram a voluntary response away from the stimulus. (ii) pro-saccades latency reflects the strength of the orienting effect of the stimulus on oculomotor execution
Summary
Faces are an important source of social signal throughout the lifespan. In adults, they have a prioritized access to the orienting system. We know that many aspects of face processing, such as identity or facial expression recognition, are not fully mature in terms of accuracy and speed, until at least mid-adolescence[24,25,26,27,28], and that the specialization of brain circuits for faces emerges gradually[29,30,31,32,33,34,35] Some of these findings suggest a non-linear development with a plateau[36], or even a dip[37] in performance at the beginning of adolescence, followed by later additional improvement. Our goal here was to investigate whether the prevalent effect of faces on the control of spatial orienting changes during late childhood and adolescence To this end we used the anti-saccade task, with either faces, cars or visual noise patterns as stimuli (see Fig. 1). Pro-saccades to faces are initiated faster than pro-saccades to other stimuli[5,6]
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