Fearful faces but not fearful eyes alone delay attention disengagement in 7-month-old infants

Age-dependent changes in the anger superiority effect: Evidence from a visual search task

The perception of threatening facial expressions is a critical skill necessary for detecting the emotional states of others and responding appropriately. The anger superiority effect hypothesis suggests that individuals are better at processing and identifying angry faces compared with other nonthreatening facial expressions. In adults, the anger superiority effect is present even after controlling for the bottom-up visual saliency, and when ecologically valid stimuli are used. However, it is as yet unclear whether this effect is present in children. To fill this gap, we tested the anger superiority effect in children ages 6-14 years in a visual search task by using emotional dynamic stimuli and equating the visual salience of target and distractors. The results suggest that in childhood, the angry superiority effect consists of improved accuracy in detecting angry faces, while in adolescence, the ability to discriminate angry faces undergoes further development, enabling faster and more accurate threat detection.

Evaluations of aggressive chasing interactions by 7-month-old infants

Recent theories of socio-moral development assume that humans evolved a capacity to evaluate others' social actions in different kinds of interactions. Prior infant studies found both reaching and visual preferences for the prosocial over the antisocial agents. However, whether the attribution of either positive or negative valence to agents' actions involved in an aggressive chasing interaction can be inferred by both reaching behaviors and visual attention deployment (i.e., disengagement of visual attention) is still an open question. Here we presented 7-month-old infants (N = 92) with events displaying an aggressive chasing interaction. By using preferential reaching and an attentional task (i.e., overlap paradigm), we assessed whether and how infants evaluate aggressive chasing interactions. The results demonstrated that young infants prefer to reach the victim over the aggressor, but neither agent affects visual attention. Moreover, such reaching preferences emerged only when dynamic cues and emotional face-like features were congruent with agents' social roles. Overall, these findings suggested that infants' evaluations of aggressive interactions are based on infants' sensitivity to some kinematic cues that characterized agents' actions and, especially, to the congruency between such motions and the face-like emotional expressions of the agents.

Differential effects of attachment security on visual fixation to facial expressions of emotion in 14-month-old infants: an eye-tracking study

Introduction

Models of attachment and information processing suggest that the attention infants allocate to social information might occur in a schema-driven processing manner according to their attachment pattern. A major source of social information for infants consists of facial expressions of emotion. We tested for differences in attention to facial expressions and emotional discrimination between infants classified as securely attached (B), insecure-avoidant (A), and insecure-resistant (C).

Methods

Sixty-one 14-month-old infants participated in the Strange Situation Procedure and an experimental task of Visual Habituation and Visual Paired-Comparison Task (VPC). In the Habituation phase, a Low-Arousal Happy face (habituation face) was presented followed by a VPC task of 6 trials composed of two contrasting emotional faces always involving the same actress: the one used in habituation (trial old face) and a new one (trial new face) portraying changes in valence (Low-Arousal Angry face), arousal (High-Arousal Happy face), or valence + arousal (High-Arousal Angry face). Measures of fixation time (FT) and number of fixations (FC) were obtained for the habituation face, the trial old face, the trial new face, and the difference between the trial old face and the trial new face using an eye-tracking system.

Results

We found a higher FT and FC for the trial new face when compared with the trial old face, regardless of the emotional condition (valence, arousal, valence + arousal contrasts), suggesting that 14-month-old infants were able to discriminate different emotional faces. However, this effect differed according to attachment pattern: resistant-attached infants (C) had significantly higher FT and FC for the new face than patterns B and A, indicating they may remain hypervigilant toward emotional change. On the contrary, avoidant infants (A) revealed significantly longer looking times to the trial old face, suggesting overall avoidance of novel expressions and thus less sensitivity to emotional change.

Discussion

Overall, these findings corroborate that attachment is associated with infants' social information processing.

Associations between attentional biases to fearful faces and social-emotional development in infants with and without an older sibling with autism

During the first year of life, infants become increasingly attuned to facial emotion, with heightened sensitivity to faces conveying threat observed by age seven months as illustrated through attentional biases (e.g., slower shifting away from fearful faces). Individual differences in these cognitive attentional biases have been discussed in relation to broader social-emotional functioning, and the current study examines these associations in infants with an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a group with an elevated likelihood of a subsequent ASD diagnosis (ELA; n = 33), and a group of infants with no family history of ASD who are at low likelihood of ASD (LLA; n = 24). All infants completed a task measuring disengagement of attention from faces at 12 months (fearful, happy, neutral), and caregivers completed the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment at 12, 18, and/or 24 months. For the full sample, greater fear bias in attention disengagement at 12 months related to more internalizing behaviors at 18 months, and this was driven by the LLA infants. When examining groups separately, findings revealed that LLA with a greater fear bias had more difficult behaviors at 12, 18, and 24 months; in contrast, ELA showed the opposite pattern, and this was most pronounced for ELA who later received an ASD diagnosis. These preliminary group-level findings suggest that heightened sensitivity to fearful faces might serve an adaptive function in children who later receive an ASD diagnosis, but in infants with no family history of ASD, increased biases might reflect a marker of social-emotional difficulties.

Signatures of emotional face processing measured by event-related potentials in 7-month-old infants

The ability to distinguish facial emotions emerges in infancy. Although this ability has been shown to emerge between 5 and 7 months of age, the literature is less clear regarding the extent to which neural correlates of perception and attention play a role in processing of specific emotions. This study's main goal was to examine this question among infants. To this end, we presented angry, fearful, and happy faces to 7-month-old infants (N = 107, 51% female) while recording event-related brain potentials. The perceptual N290 component showed a heightened response for fearful and happy relative to angry faces. Attentional processing, indexed by the P400, showed some evidence of a heightened response for fearful relative to happy and angry faces. We did not observe robust differences by emotion in the negative central (Nc) component, although trends were consistent with previous work suggesting a heightened response to negatively valenced expressions. Results suggest that perceptual (N290) and attentional (P400) processing is sensitive to emotions in faces, but these processes do not provide evidence for a fear-specific bias across components.

Cognitive deficits for facial emotions among male adolescent delinquents with conduct disorder

According to the social-cognitive theory and the social-information-processing theory, individuals with conduct disorder, a persistent and repetitive pattern of problematic behavior, might have cognitive biases toward hostile facial expressions. However, according to the optimal stimulation/arousal theory, the stimulation-seeking theory and the fearlessness theory, individuals with conduct disorder might have less fear and show less response to hostile or threatening facial expressions. To reconcile the discrepancy, we examined the cognitive biases including attentional processing and working memory processing to emotional faces among adolescents with conduct disorder. 35 male adolescent delinquents with conduct disorder and 35 age-matched delinquents without conduct disorder completed a visual search task and a delayed-match-to-sample task to examine their attentional processing and working memory processing for sad, angry, happy, and fearful faces, respectively. It was found that conduct disordered individuals searched angry and fearful faces, rather than sad and happy faces, more slowly than individuals without conduct disorder. However, no difference in mnemonic processing for facial emotions was found between groups. The results indicated that male adolescent delinquents with conduct disorder showed deficits in attentional orientation to hostile and threatening faces, supporting the optimal stimulation/arousal theory, the stimulation-seeking theory and the fearlessness theory, but not the social-cognitive theory.

A neural marker of rapid discrimination of facial expression in 3.5- and 7-month-old infants

Infants’ ability to discriminate facial expressions has been widely explored, but little is known about the rapid and automatic ability to discriminate a given expression against many others in a single experiment. Here we investigated the development of facial expression discrimination in infancy with fast periodic visual stimulation coupled with scalp electroencephalography (EEG). EEG was recorded in eighteen 3.5- and eighteen 7-month-old infants presented with a female face expressing disgust, happiness, or a neutral emotion (in different stimulation sequences) at a base stimulation frequency of 6 Hz. Pictures of the same individual expressing other emotions (either anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or neutrality, randomly and excluding the expression presented at the base frequency) were introduced every six stimuli (at 1 Hz). Frequency-domain analysis revealed an objective (i.e., at the predefined 1-Hz frequency and harmonics) expression-change brain response in both 3.5- and 7-month-olds, indicating the visual discrimination of various expressions from disgust, happiness and neutrality from these early ages. At 3.5 months, the responses to the discrimination from disgust and happiness expressions were located mainly on medial occipital sites, whereas a more lateral topography was found for the response to the discrimination from neutrality, suggesting that expression discrimination from an emotionally neutral face relies on distinct visual cues than discrimination from a disgust or happy face. Finally, expression discrimination from happiness was associated with a reduced activity over posterior areas and an additional response over central frontal scalp regions at 7 months as compared to 3.5 months. This result suggests developmental changes in the processing of happiness expressions as compared to negative/neutral ones within this age range.

Face Processing in Early Development: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies and Considerations in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic

Human faces are one of the most prominent stimuli in the visual environment of young infants and convey critical information for the development of social cognition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask wearing has become a common practice outside the home environment. With masks covering nose and mouth regions, the facial cues available to the infant are impoverished. The impact of these changes on development is unknown but is critical to debates around mask mandates in early childhood settings. As infants grow, they increasingly interact with a broader range of familiar and unfamiliar people outside the home; in these settings, mask wearing could possibly influence social development. In order to generate hypotheses about the effects of mask wearing on infant social development, in the present work, we systematically review N = 129 studies selected based on the most recent PRISMA guidelines providing a state-of-the-art framework of behavioral studies investigating face processing in early infancy. We focused on identifying sensitive periods during which being exposed to specific facial features or to the entire face configuration has been found to be important for the development of perceptive and socio-communicative skills. For perceptive skills, infants gradually learn to analyze the eyes or the gaze direction within the context of the entire face configuration. This contributes to identity recognition as well as emotional expression discrimination. For socio-communicative skills, direct gaze and emotional facial expressions are crucial for attention engagement while eye-gaze cuing is important for joint attention. Moreover, attention to the mouth is particularly relevant for speech learning. We discuss possible implications of the exposure to masked faces for developmental needs and functions. Providing groundwork for further research, we encourage the investigation of the consequences of mask wearing for infants' perceptive and socio-communicative development, suggesting new directions within the research field.

Developmental patterns of affective attention across the first 2 years of life

This study examined patterns of attention toward affective stimuli in a longitudinal sample of typically developing infants (N = 357, 147 females, 50% White, 22% Latinx, 16% African American/Black, 3% Asian, 8% mixed race, 1% not reported) using two eye-tracking tasks that measure vigilance to (rapid detection), engagement with (total looking toward), and disengagement from (latency to looking away) emotional facial configurations. Infants completed each task at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age from 2016 to 2020. Multilevel growth models demonstrate that, over the first 2 years of life, infants became faster at detecting and spent more time engaging with angry over neutral faces. These results have implications for our understanding of the development of affect-biased attention.

Mother's engagement with infant linked to infant's responding to threat

The early development of threat perception in infancy might be dependent on caregiver context, but this link has not yet been studied in human infants. This study examined the emergence of the young infant's response to threat in the context of variations in caregiving behavior. Eighty infant-caregiver dyads (39 female infants, all of western European descent) visited the laboratory when the infant was 5 months old. Each dyad completed a free-play task, from which we coded for the mother's level of engagement: the amount of talking, close proximity, positive affect, and attention directed toward the infant. When the infant was 7 months old, they came back to the laboratory and we used functional near infrared spectroscopy and eye tracking to measure infants' neural and attentional responses to threatening angry faces. In response to threat, infants of more-engaged mothers showed increased brain responses in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-a brain region associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control among adults-and reduced attentional avoidance. These results point to a role for caregiver behavioral context in the early development of brain systems involved in human threat responding.

Still connecting the dots: An investigation into infants' attentional bias to threat using an eye-tracking task

An attentional bias toward threat has been theorized to be a normative aspect of infants' threat and safety learning, and an indicator of risk for internalizing psychopathology in older populations. To date, only four studies have examined this bias using the dot-probe task in infancy and the findings are mixed. We extended the literature by examining patterns of attention to threat in a culturally and linguistically diverse sample of infants aged 5-11 months old (N = 151) using all measures previously employed in the infant dot-probe literature. Given that an attentional bias toward threat is associated with higher risk of developing anxiety disorders later in life, we also examined how negative affect-an early correlate of later anxiety disorders-is related to attentional bias toward threat in infancy. This study was the first to use a consistent measure of negative affect across the whole sample. An eye-tracking dot-probe task was used to examine attentional bias toward threat (i.e., angry faces) relative to positive (i.e., happy faces) stimuli. Results showed that an attention bias to threat was not characteristic of infants at this age, and negative affect did not moderate the putative relationship between attention and emotional faces (angry, happy). These findings therefore suggest that attention biases to socio-emotional threat may not have emerged by 11 months old.

Past and present experiences with maternal touch affect infants' attention toward emotional faces

Maternal touch is considered crucial in regulating infants' internal states when facing unknown or distressing situations. Here, we explored the effects of maternal touch on 7-month-old infants' preferences towards emotions. Infants' looking times were measured through a two-trial preferential looking paradigm, while infants observed dynamic videos of happy and angry facial expressions. During the observation, half of the infants received an affective touch (i.e., stroke), while the other half received a non-affective stimulation (i.e., fingertip squeeze) from their mother. Further, we assessed the frequency of maternal touch in the mother-infant dyad through The Parent-Infant Caregiving Touch Scale (PICTS). Our results have shown that infants' attention to angry and happy facial expressions varied as a function of both present and past experiences with maternal touch. Specifically, in the affective touch condition, as the frequency of previous maternal affective tactile care increased (PICTS), the avoidance of angry faces decreased. Conversely, in the non-affective touch condition, as the frequency of previous maternal affective tactile care increased (PICTS), the avoidance of angry faces increased as well. Thus, past experience with maternal affective touch is a crucial predictor of the regulatory effects that actual maternal touch exerts on infants' visual exploration of emotional stimuli.

How does gaze to faces support face-to-face interaction? A review and perspective

Gaze-where one looks, how long, and when-plays an essential part in human social behavior. While many aspects of social gaze have been reviewed, there is no comprehensive review or theoretical framework that describes how gaze to faces supports face-to-face interaction. In this review, I address the following questions: (1) When does gaze need to be allocated to a particular region of a face in order to provide the relevant information for successful interaction; (2) How do humans look at other people, and faces in particular, regardless of whether gaze needs to be directed at a particular region to acquire the relevant visual information; (3) How does gaze support the regulation of interaction? The work reviewed spans psychophysical research, observational research, and eye-tracking research in both lab-based and interactive contexts. Based on the literature overview, I sketch a framework for future research based on dynamic systems theory. The framework holds that gaze should be investigated in relation to sub-states of the interaction, encompassing sub-states of the interactors, the content of the interaction as well as the interactive context. The relevant sub-states for understanding gaze in interaction vary over different timescales from microgenesis to ontogenesis and phylogenesis. The framework has important implications for vision science, psychopathology, developmental science, and social robotics.

Attentional bias to fearful faces in infants at high risk for autism spectrum disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their first-degree relatives show differences from neurotypical individuals in emotional face processing. Prospective studies of infant siblings of children with ASD, a group at high risk for autism (HRA), allow researchers to examine the early emergence of these differences. This study used eye tracking to examine disengagement of attention from emotional faces (fearful, happy, neutral) at 6, 9, and 12 months in low-risk control infants (LRC) and HRA infants who received a subsequent clinical judgment of ASD (HRA+) or non-ASD (HRA-). Infants saw centrally presented faces followed by a peripheral distractor (with face remaining present). For each emotion, latency to shift to the distractor and percentage of trials with no shift were calculated. Results showed increased saccadic latency and a greater percentage of no-shift trials for fearful faces. No between-group differences were present for emotion; however, there was an interaction between age and group for disengagement latency, with HRA+ infants slower to shift at 12 months compared with the other 2 groups. Exploratory correlational analyses looking at shift biases to fearful faces alongside measures of social behavior at 12 and 18 months (from the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales) revealed that for HRA+ infants, 9- and 12-month fear biases were significantly related to 12- and 18-month social abilities, respectively. This work suggests that both low- and high-risk infants show biases to threat-relevant faces, and that for HRA+, differences in attention shifting emerge with age, and a stronger fear bias could potentially relate to less social difficulty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

What drives the attentional bias for fearful faces? An eye-tracking investigation of 7-month-old infants' visual scanning patterns

Seven-month-old infants display a robust attentional bias for fearful faces; however, the mechanisms driving this bias remain unclear. The objective of the current study was to replicate the attentional bias for fearful faces and to investigate how infants' online scanning patterns relate to this preference. Infants' visual scanning patterns toward fearful and happy faces were captured using eye tracking in a paired-preference task, specifically exploring if the fear preference is driven by increased attention to particular facial features. Infants allocated increased attention toward the fearful face compared to the happy face overall, thus successfully replicating the attentional bias, and greater attention toward the fearful eyes was associated with a greater magnitude of the fear preference. The current findings suggest that the fearful eyes are a salient facial feature in capturing infants' attention toward the fearful face and that increased scanning of the fearful eyes may be one mechanism driving the overall fear preference. In addition, scanning patterns, and attention to critical features specifically, are highlighted as a strategy for examining the mechanisms underlying the development of emotion recognition abilities in infancy.

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

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.

Individual differences in infancy research: Letting the baby stand out from the crowd

Within the developmental literature, there is an often unspoken tension between studies that aim to capture broad scale, fairly universal nomothetic traits, and studies that focus on mechanisms and trajectories that are idiographic and bounded to some extent by systematic individual differences. The suitability of these approaches varies as a function of the specific research interests at hand. Although the approaches are interdependent, they have often proceeded as parallel research traditions. The current review notes some of the historical and empirical bases for this divide and suggests that each tradition would benefit from incorporating both methodological approaches to iteratively examine universal (nomothetic) phenomena and the individual differences (idiographic) factors that lead to variation in development. This work may help isolate underlying causal mechanisms, better understand current functioning, and predict long-term developmental consequences. In doing so, we also highlight empirical and structural issues that need to be addressed to support this integration.

Temperament moderates developmental changes in vigilance to emotional faces in infants: Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Affect-biased attention reflects the prioritization of attention to stimuli that individuals deem to be motivationally and/or affectively salient. Normative affect-biased attention is early-emerging, providing an experience-expectant function for socioemotional development. Evidence is limited regarding how reactive and regulatory aspects of temperament may shape maturational changes in affect-biased attention that operate at the earliest stages of information processing. This study implemented a novel eye-tracking paradigm designed to capture attention vigilance in infants. We assessed temperamental negative affect (NA) and attention control (AC) using laboratory observations and parent-reports, respectively. Among infants (N = 161 in the final analysis) aged 4 to 24 months (Mean = 12.05, SD = 5.46; 86 males), there was a significant age effect on fixation latency to emotional versus neutral faces only in infants characterized with high NA and high AC. Specifically, in infants with these temperament traits, older infants showed shorter latency (i.e., greater vigilance) toward neutral faces, which are potentially novel and unfamiliar to infants. The age effect on vigilance toward emotional faces was not significant. The findings support the argument that the development of affect-biased attention is associated with multiple temperament processes that potentially interact over time.

Three-month-old infants show enhanced behavioral and neural sensitivity to fearful faces

An important feature of the development of emotion recognition in infants is the emergence of a robust attentional bias for fearful faces. There is some debate about when this enhanced sensitivity to fearful expressions develops. The current study explored whether 3-month-olds demonstrate differential behavioral and neural responding to happy and fearful faces. Three-month-old infants (n = 69) participated in a behavioral task that assessed whether they show a visual preference for fearful faces and an event-related potential (ERP) task that assessed their neural responses to fearful and happy faces. Infants showed a looking preference for fearful over happy faces. They also showed differential neural responding over occiptotemporal regions that have been implicated in face perception (i.e., N290, P400), but not over frontocentral regions that have been implicated in attentional processes (i.e., Nc). These findings suggest that 3-month-olds display an early perceptual sensitivity to fearful faces, which may presage the emergence of the attentional bias for fearful faces in older infants. Tracking the ontogeny of this phenomenon is necessary to understand its relationship with later developmental outcomes.

Cross-cultural analysis of attention disengagement times supports the dissociation of faces and patterns in the infant brain

Infants are slower to disengage from faces than non-face patterns when distracted by novel competing stimuli. While this perceptual predilection for faces is well documented, its universality and mechanisms in relation to other aspects of attention are poorly understood. We analysed attention disengagement times for faces and non-face patterns in a large sample of 6-to 9-month-old infants (N = 637), pooled from eye tracking studies in socioculturally diverse settings (Finland, Malawi, South Africa). Disengagement times were classified into distinct groups of quick and delayed/censored responses by unsupervised clustering. Delayed disengagement was frequent for faces (52.1% of trials), but almost negligible for patterns (3.9% of trials) in all populations. The magnitude of this attentional bias varied by individuals, whereas the impact of situational factors and facial expression was small. Individual variations in disengagement from faces were moderately stable within testing sessions and independent from variations in disengagement times for patterns. These results point to a fundamental dissociation of face and pattern processing in infants and demonstrate that the bias for faces can be robust against distractors and habituation. The results raise the possibility that attention to faces varies as an independent, early-emerging social trait in populations.

Rapid face processing for positive and negative emotions in 5‐, 7‐, and 12‐month‐old infants: An exploratory study

Processing of positive and negative facial expressions in infancy follows a distinct course with a bias towards fearful facial expressions starting at 7 months of age; however, little is known about the developmental trajectory of fear processing and other facial expressions, and if this bias is driven by specific regions of the face. This study used eye tracking to examine the processing of positive and negative emotional faces in independent groups of 5- (n = 43), 7- (n = 60), and 12-month-old infants (n = 70). Methods: Infants were shown static images of female faces exhibiting happy, anger, and fear expressions, for one-second each. Total looking time and looking time for areas of interest (AOIs) including forehead and eyes (top), mouth and chin (bottom), and contour of each image were computed. Infants across all ages looked longer to fear faces than angry or happy faces. Negative emotions generally elicited greater looking times for the top of the face than did happy faces. In addition, we also found that at 12 months of age infants looked longer for the bottom of the faces than did 5-month-olds. Our study suggests that the visual bias to attend longer to fearful faces may be in place by 5 months of age, and between 5 and 12 months of age, there seems to be a developmental shift towards looking more to the bottom of the faces. STATEMENT OF CONTRIBUTION: What is already known in this subject? Bias for fear face processing is present at 7 months of age. Using older data collection systems, we have some idea about which facial features recruit infant attention. What the present study adds? Well-controlled paradigm that examines both positive and negative facial expressions, to different areas of interest in the face. Use of the same paradigm to test a cross-sectional sample of infants in distinct developmental stages - 5, 7, and 12 months.

Attention biases and social-emotional development in preschool-aged children who have been exposed to domestic violence

BACKGROUND

School-aged children and adolescents exposed to domestic violence (DV) disproportionality attend to threatening and sad cues in their environment. This bias in attention has been found to predict elevations in symptoms of psychopathology. Studies have yet to explore attention biases using eyetracking technology in preschool-aged children with DV exposure.

OBJECTIVE

This study investigated whether preschool-aged children exposed to DV show vigilance to angry and sad faces versus happy faces and a target non-face stimulus relative to non-exposed children, and whether such vigilance relates to child social-emotional development.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

Preschool-aged children were recruited from a large, diverse, urban community. DV-exposed children were recruited from a dyadic, mother-child treatment group specifically designed for, and restricted to, mothers who have experienced domestic violence (DV-exposed group, n = 23). Children with no prior exposure to DV and their mothers were recruited within the same community (non-exposed group, n = 32).

METHODS

Children completed an eye-tracking task to assess their attention to face stimuli and mothers rated their children's social-emotional development. Total duration of fixations were analyzed.

RESULTS

Results showed that DV-exposed children have a significantly stronger attention bias away from sad faces (p = 0.03; d = 0.62) and neutral faces (p = 0.02; d = 0.70) relative to non-exposed children, and this attention bias away from sad and neutral faces is associated with child social-emotional problems. Contrary to our hypothesis, no bias towards anger was found for DV-exposed versus non-exposed children.

CONCLUSIONS

This study contributes to growing evidence that young children's negative attention biases influence functioning and have important implications for children's well-being and development.

Threat-related Attention Bias in Socioemotional Development: A Critical Review and Methodological Considerations

Cross-sectional evidence suggests that attention bias to threat is linked to anxiety disorders and anxiety vulnerability in both children and adults. However, there is a lack of developmental evidence regarding the causal mechanisms through which attention bias to threat might convey risks for socioemotional problems, such as anxiety. Gaining insights into this question demands longitudinal research to track the complex interplay between threat-related attention and socioemotional functioning. Developing and implementing reliable and valid assessments tools is essential to this line of work. This review presents theoretical accounts and empirical evidence from behavioral, eye-tracking, and neural assessments of attention to discuss our current understanding of the development of normative threat-related attention in infancy, as well as maladaptive threat-related attention patterns that may be associated with the development of anxiety. This review highlights the importance of measuring threat-related attention using multiple attention paradigms at multiple levels of analysis. In order to understand if and how threat-related attention bias in real-life, social interactive contexts can predict socioemotional development outcomes, this review proposes that future research cannot solely rely on screen-based paradigms but needs to extend the assessment of threat-related attention to naturalistic settings. Mobile eye-tracking technology provides an effective tool for capturing threat-related attention processes in vivo as children navigate fear-eliciting environments and may help us uncover more proximal bio-psycho-behavioral markers of anxiety.

Attentional bias assessed by a facial expression cuing paradigm in infants

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.

Neural correlates of facial emotion processing in infancy

In the present study we examined the neural correlates of facial emotion processing in the first year of life using ERP measures and cortical source analysis. EEG data were collected cross-sectionally from 5- (N = 49), 7- (N = 50), and 12-month-old (N = 51) infants while they were viewing images of angry, fearful, and happy faces. The N290 component was found to be larger in amplitude in response to fearful and happy than angry faces in all posterior clusters and showed largest response to fear than the other two emotions only over the right occipital area. The P400 and Nc components were found to be larger in amplitude in response to angry than happy and fearful faces over central and frontal scalp. Cortical source analysis of the N290 component revealed greater cortical activation in the right fusiform face area in response to fearful faces. This effect started to emerge at 5 months and became well established at 7 months, but it disappeared at 12 months. The P400 and Nc components were primarily localized to the PCC/Precuneus where heightened responses to angry faces were observed. The current results suggest the detection of a fearful face in infants' brain can happen shortly (~200-290 ms) after the stimulus onset, and this process may rely on the face network and develop substantially between 5 to 7 months of age. The current findings also suggest the differential processing of angry faces occurred later in the P400/Nc time window, which recruits the PCC/Precuneus and is associated with the allocation of infants' attention.

Early development of attention to threat-related facial expressions

Infants from an early age have a bias to attend more to faces than non-faces and after 5 months are particularly attentive to fearful faces. We examined the specificity of this "fear bias" in 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old infants (N = 269) and 36-month-old children (N = 191) and whether its development is associated with features of the early rearing environment, specifically maternal anxiety and depression symptoms. Attention dwell times were assessed by measuring the latencies of gaze shifts from a stimulus at fixation to a new stimulus in the visual periphery. In infancy, dwell times were shorter for non-face control stimuli vs. happy faces at all ages, and happy vs. fearful, but not angry, faces at 7 and 12 months. At 36 months, dwell times were shorter for non-faces and happy faces compared to fearful and angry faces. Individual variations in attention dwell times were not associated with mothers' self-reported depression or anxiety symptoms at either age. The results suggest that sensitivity to fearful faces precedes a more general bias for threat-alerting stimuli in early development. We did not find evidence that the initial manifestation of these biases is related to moderate variations in maternal depression or anxiety symptoms.

Are 6-month-old human infants able to transfer emotional information (happy or angry) from voices to faces? An eye-tracking study

The present study examined whether 6-month-old infants could transfer amodal information (i.e. independently of sensory modalities) from emotional voices to emotional faces. Thus, sequences of successive emotional stimuli (voice or face from one sensory modality -auditory- to another sensory modality -visual-), corresponding to a cross-modal transfer, were displayed to 24 infants. Each sequence presented an emotional (angry or happy) or neutral voice, uniquely, followed by the simultaneous presentation of two static emotional faces (angry or happy, congruous or incongruous with the emotional voice). Eye movements in response to the visual stimuli were recorded with an eye-tracker. First, results suggested no difference in infants’ looking time to happy or angry face after listening to the neutral voice or the angry voice. Nevertheless, after listening to the happy voice, infants looked longer at the incongruent angry face (the mouth area in particular) than the congruent happy face. These results revealed that a cross-modal transfer (from auditory to visual modalities) is possible for 6-month-old infants only after the presentation of a happy voice, suggesting that they recognize this emotion amodally.

Fearful but not happy expressions boost face detection in human infants

Human adults show an attentional bias towards fearful faces, an adaptive behaviour that relies on amygdala function. This attentional bias emerges in infancy between 5 and 7 months, but the underlying developmental mechanism is unknown. To examine possible precursors, we investigated whether 3.5-, 6- and 12-month-old infants show facilitated detection of fearful faces in noise, compared to happy faces. Happy or fearful faces, mixed with noise, were presented to infants (N = 192), paired with pure noise. We applied multivariate pattern analyses to several measures of infant looking behaviour to derive a criterion-free, continuous measure of face detection evidence in each trial. Analyses of the resulting psychometric curves supported the hypothesis of a detection advantage for fearful faces compared to happy faces, from 3.5 months of age and across all age groups. Overall, our data show a readiness to detect fearful faces (compared to happy faces) in younger infants that developmentally precedes the previously documented attentional bias to fearful faces in older infants and adults.

The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to threat is associated with anxiety, particularly if coupled with temperamental risk. Examining the emerging relations between attention to threat and temperamental negative affect may help distinguish normative from at-risk patterns of attention. Infants (N = 145) ages 4 to 24 months (M = 12.93 months, SD = 5.57) completed an eye-tracking task modeled on the attention bias "dot-probe" task used with older children and adults. With age, infants spent greater time attending to emotion faces, particularly threat faces. All infants displayed slower latencies to fixate to incongruent versus congruent probes. Neither relation was moderated by temperament. Trial-by-trial analyses found that dwell time to the face was associated with latency to orient to subsequent probes, moderated by the infant's age and temperament. In young infants low in negative affect longer processing of angry faces was associated with faster subsequent fixation to probes; young infants high in negative affect displayed the opposite pattern at trend. Findings suggest that although age was directly associated with an emerging bias to threat, the impact of processing threat on subsequent orienting was associated with age and temperament. Early patterns of attention may shape how children respond to their environments, potentially via attention's gate-keeping role in framing a child's social world for processing. (PsycINFO Database Record

Maternal anxiety predicts attentional bias towards threat in infancy

Although cognitive theories of psychopathology suggest that attention bias toward threat plays a role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety, there is relatively little evidence regarding individual differences in the earliest development of attention bias toward threat. The current study examines attention bias toward threat during its potential first emergence by evaluating the relations between attention bias and known risk factors of anxiety (i.e., temperamental negative affect and maternal anxiety). We measured attention bias to emotional faces in infants (N = 98; 57 male) ages 4 to 24 months during an attention disengagement eye-tracking paradigm. We hypothesized that (a) there would be an attentional bias toward threat in the full sample of infants, replicating previous studies; (b) attentional bias toward threat would be positively related to maternal anxiety; and (c) attention bias toward threat would be positively related to temperamental negative affect. Finally, (d) we explored the potential interaction between temperament and maternal anxiety in predicting attention bias toward threat. We found that attention bias to the affective faces did not change with age, and that bias was not related to temperament. However, attention bias to threat, but not attention bias to happy faces, was positively related to maternal anxiety, such that higher maternal anxiety predicted a larger attention bias for all infants. These findings provide support for attention bias as a putative early mechanism by which early markers of risk are associated with socioemotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record

Further evidence of early development of attention to dynamic facial emotions: Reply to Grossmann and Jessen

Adults exhibit enhanced attention to negative emotions like fear, which is thought to be an adaptive reaction to emotional information. Previous research, mostly conducted with static faces, suggests that infants exhibit an attentional bias toward fearful faces only at around 7months of age. In a recent study (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2016, Vol. 147, pp. 100-110), we found that 5-month-olds also exhibit heightened attention to fear when tested with dynamic face videos. This indication of an earlier development of an attention bias to fear raises questions about developmental mechanisms that have been proposed to underlie this function. However, Grossmann and Jessen (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2016, Vol. 153, pp. 149-154) argued that this result may have been due to differences in the amount of movement in the videos rather than a response to emotional information. To examine this possibility, we tested a new sample of 5-month-olds exactly as in the original study (Heck, Hock, White, Jubran, & Bhatt, 2016) but with inverted faces. We found that the fear bias seen in our study was no longer apparent with inverted faces. Therefore, it is likely that infants' enhanced attention to fear in our study was indeed a response to emotions rather than a reaction to arbitrary low-level stimulus features. This finding indicates enhanced attention to fear at 5months and underscores the need to find mechanisms that engender the development of emotion knowledge early in life.

The development of attention to dynamic facial emotions

Appropriate processing of emotions is paramount for successful social functioning. Adults' enhanced attention to negative emotions such as fear is thought to be a critical aspect of this adaptive functioning. Prior studies indicate that increased attention to fear relative to positive or neutral emotions begins at around 7months of age, and it has been suggested that this negativity bias is related to self-locomotion. However, these studies mostly used static faces, potentially limiting information available to the infants. In the current study, 3.5-month-olds (n=24) and 5-month-olds (n=24) were exposed to dynamic faces expressing fear, happy, or neutral emotions and a distracting peripheral checkerboard. The 5-month-olds looked proportionally longer at the face compared with the checkerboard when the face was fearful than when it was happy or neutral. Conversely, the 3.5-month-olds did not differentiate their attention as a function of emotion. These results indicate that the onset of enhanced attention to fear occurs between 3.5 and 5months of age. This finding raises questions about the developmental mechanisms that drive attentional bias given that the idea of the onset of self-locomotion being a catalyst for the development of negativity bias might no longer hold.

The influence of bilingualism on the preference for the mouth region of dynamic faces

Bilingual infants show an extended period of looking at the mouth of talking faces, which provides them with additional articulatory cues that can be used to boost the challenging situation of learning two languages (Pons, Bosch & Lewkowicz, 2015). However, the eye region also provides fundamental cues for emotion perception and recognition, as well as communication. Here, we explored whether the adaptations resulting from learning two languages are specific to linguistic content or if they also influence the focus of attention when looking at dynamic faces. We recorded the eye gaze of bilingual and monolingual infants (8- and 12-month-olds) while watching videos of infants and adults portraying different emotional states (neutral, crying, and laughing). When looking at infant faces, bilinguals looked longer at the mouth region as compared to monolinguals regardless of age. However, when presented with adult faces, 8-month-old bilingual infants looked longer at the mouth region and less at the eye region compared to 8-month-old monolingual infants, but no effect of language exposure was found at 12 months of age. These findings suggest that the bias to the mouth region in bilingual infants at 8 months of age can be generalized to other audiovisual dynamic faces that do not contain linguistic information. We discuss the potential implications of such bias in early social and communicative development.

Implications of newborn amygdala connectivity for fear and cognitive development at 6-months-of-age

The first year of life is an important period for emergence of fear in humans. While animal models have revealed developmental changes in amygdala circuitry accompanying emerging fear, human neural systems involved in early fear development remain poorly understood. To increase understanding of the neural foundations of human fear, it is important to consider parallel cognitive development, which may modulate associations between typical development of early fear and subsequent risk for fear-related psychopathology. We, therefore, examined amygdala functional connectivity with rs-fcMRI in 48 neonates (M=3.65 weeks, SD=1.72), and measured fear and cognitive development at 6-months-of-age. Stronger, positive neonatal amygdala connectivity to several regions, including bilateral anterior insula and ventral striatum, was prospectively associated with higher fear at 6-months. Stronger amygdala connectivity to ventral anterior cingulate/anterior medial prefrontal cortex predicted a specific phenotype of higher fear combined with more advanced cognitive development. Overall, findings demonstrate unique profiles of neonatal amygdala functional connectivity related to emerging fear and cognitive development, which may have implications for normative and pathological fear in later years. Consideration of infant fear in the context of cognitive development will likely contribute to a more nuanced understanding of fear, its neural bases, and its implications for future mental health.

Greater Pupil Size in Response to Emotional Faces as an Early Marker of Social-Communicative Difficulties in Infants at High Risk for Autism

When scanning faces, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have shown reduced visual attention (e.g., less time on eyes) and atypical autonomic responses (e.g., heightened arousal). To understand how these differences might explain sub-clinical variability in social functioning, 9-month-olds, with or without a family history of ASD, viewed emotionally-expressive faces, and gaze and pupil diameter (a measure of autonomic activation) were recorded using eye-tracking. Infants at high-risk for ASD with no subsequent clinical diagnosis (HRA-) and low-risk controls (LRC) showed similar face scanning and attention to eyes and mouth. Attention was overall greater to eyes than mouth, but this varied as a function of the emotion presented. HRA- showed significantly larger pupil size than LRC. Correlations between scanning at 9 months, pupil size at 9 months, and 18-month social-communicative behavior, revealed positive associations between pupil size and attention to both face and eyes at 9 months in LRC, and a negative association between 9-month pupil size and 18-month social-communicative behavior in HRA-. The present findings point to heightened autonomic arousal in HRA-. Further, with greater arousal relating to worse social-communicative functioning at 18 months, this work points to a mechanism by which unaffected siblings might develop atypical social behavior.

Attachment and maternal sensitivity are related to infants' monitoring of animated social interactions

BACKGROUND

Infants have been shown to possess remarkable competencies in social understanding. Little is known, however, about the interplay between the quality of infants' social-emotional experiences with their caregivers and social-cognitive processes in infancy.

METHOD

Using eye-tracking we investigated the relation of infant attachment quality and maternal sensitivity with 12-month-old infants' monitoring patterns during the observation of abstractly depicted interactions of a "parent" and a "baby" figure.

RESULTS

We found that secure infants focused their attention on the "parent" figure relative to the "baby" figure more than insecure infants when the two figures got separated. Infants with more sensitive mothers focused their attention more on the ongoing behavior of the "parent" figure after the separation than infants with less sensitive mothers when distress of the "baby" figure was implied by accompanying baby crying sounds.

CONCLUSION

Our findings support the notion that early social-emotional experiences with the caregiver are related to social information processing and that these social information processing patterns might be markers of infants' developing internal working models of attachment.

Automatic Detection of Attention Shifts in Infancy: Eye Tracking in the Fixation Shift Paradigm

This study measured changes in switches of attention between 1 and 9 months of age in 67 typically developing infants. Remote eye-tracking (Tobii X120) was used to measure saccadic latencies, related to switches of fixation, as a measure of shifts of attention, from a central stimulus to a peripheral visual target, measured in the Fixation Shift Paradigm. Fixation shifts occur later if the central fixation stimulus stays visible when the peripheral target appears (competition condition), than if the central stimulus disappears as the peripheral target appears (non-competition condition). This difference decreases with age. Our results show significantly faster disengagement in infants over 4 months than in the younger group, and provide more precise measures of fixation shifts, than behavioural observation with the same paradigm. Reduced saccadic latencies in the course of a test session indicate a novel learning effect. The Fixation Shift Paradigm combined with remote eye-tracking measures showed improved temporal and spatial accuracy compared to direct observation by a trained observer, and allowed an increased number of trials in a short testing time. This makes it an infant-friendly non-invasive procedure, involving minimal observational training, suitable for use in future studies of clinical populations to detect early attentional abnormalities in the first few months of life.

The developmental emergence of unconscious fear processing from eyes during infancy

From early in life, emotion detection plays an important role during social interactions. Recently, 7-month-old infants have been shown to process facial signs of fear in others without conscious perception and solely on the basis of their eyes. However, it is not known whether unconscious fear processing from eyes is present before 7months of age or only emerges at around 7months. To investigate this question, we measured 5-month-old infants' event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to subliminally presented fearful and non-fearful eyes and compared these with 7-month-old infants' ERP responses from a previous study. Our ERP results revealed that only 7-month-olds, but not 5-month-olds, distinguished between fearful and non-fearful eyes. Specifically, 7-month-olds' processing of fearful eyes was reflected in early visual processes over occipital cortex and later attentional processes over frontal cortex. This suggests that, in line with prior work on the conscious detection of fearful faces, the brain processes associated with the unconscious processing of fearful eyes develop between 5 and 7months of age. More generally, these findings support the notion that emotion perception and the underlying brain processes undergo critical change during the first year of life. Therefore, the current data provide further evidence for viewing infancy as a formative period in human socioemotional functioning.

Attention to Faces Expressing Negative Emotion at 7 Months Predicts Attachment Security at 14 Months

To investigate potential infant-related antecedents characterizing later attachment security, this study tested whether attention to facial expressions, assessed with an eye-tracking paradigm at 7 months of age (N = 73), predicted infant-mother attachment in the Strange Situation Procedure at 14 months. Attention to fearful faces at 7 months predicted attachment security, with a smaller attentional bias to fearful expressions associated with insecure attachment. Attachment disorganization in particular was linked to an absence of the age-typical attentional bias to fear. These data provide the first evidence linking infants' attentional bias to negative facial expressions with attachment formation and suggest reduced sensitivity to facial expressions of negative emotion as a testable trait that could link attachment disorganization with later behavioral outcomes.

Attention and positive affect: temporal switching or spatial broadening?

Evolutionary reasoning and computation suggest that positive affect is associated with higher attentional flexibility than negative affect, even when affectively neutral material is processed. The affective modulation of interference in the Eriksen flanker task seems, however, more readily explained by a spatial broadening of attention due to positive affect. It is argued here that these results should also be interpreted in terms of an increased switching over time between flankers and target (i.e., flexibility). The two hypotheses were contrasted with positive and negative mood inductions in a masked-flanker task. The interval (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony; SOA) with which the masked flankers preceded the target letter was parametrically varied. In contrast to what is found with simultaneous non-masked flanker presentation, masking produced larger interference with negative than with positive moods. In addition, a crossover interaction between mood and SOA emerged. These results seem incompatible with a spatial broadening account and support an affective modulation account in terms of flexibility.

Dynamic eye tracking based metrics for infant gaze patterns in the face-distractor competition paradigm

OBJECTIVE

To develop new standardized eye tracking based measures and metrics for infants' gaze dynamics in the face-distractor competition paradigm.

METHOD

Eye tracking data were collected from two samples of healthy 7-month-old (total n = 45), as well as one sample of 5-month-old infants (n = 22) in a paradigm with a picture of a face or a non-face pattern as a central stimulus, and a geometric shape as a lateral stimulus. The data were analyzed by using conventional measures of infants' initial disengagement from the central to the lateral stimulus (i.e., saccadic reaction time and probability) and, additionally, novel measures reflecting infants gaze dynamics after the initial disengagement (i.e., cumulative allocation of attention to the central vs. peripheral stimulus).

RESULTS

The results showed that the initial saccade away from the centrally presented stimulus is followed by a rapid re-engagement of attention with the central stimulus, leading to cumulative preference for the central stimulus over the lateral stimulus over time. This pattern tended to be stronger for salient facial expressions as compared to non-face patterns, was replicable across two independent samples of 7-month-old infants, and differentiated between 7 and 5 month-old infants.

CONCLUSION

The results suggest that eye tracking based assessments of infants' cumulative preference for faces over time can be readily parameterized and standardized, and may provide valuable techniques for future studies examining normative developmental changes in preference for social signals.

SIGNIFICANCE

Standardized measures of early developing face preferences may have potential to become surrogate biomarkers of neurocognitive and social development.

Emotional facial expressions reduce neural adaptation to face identity

In human social interactions, facial emotional expressions are a crucial source of information. Repeatedly presented information typically leads to an adaptation of neural responses. However, processing seems sustained with emotional facial expressions. Therefore, we tested whether sustained processing of emotional expressions, especially threat-related expressions, would attenuate neural adaptation. Neutral and emotional expressions (happy, mixed and fearful) of same and different identity were presented at 3 Hz. We used electroencephalography to record the evoked steady-state visual potentials (ssVEP) and tested to what extent the ssVEP amplitude adapts to the same when compared with different face identities. We found adaptation to the identity of a neutral face. However, for emotional faces, adaptation was reduced, decreasing linearly with negative valence, with the least adaptation to fearful expressions. This short and straightforward method may prove to be a valuable new tool in the study of emotional processing.

Positive, but not negative, facial expressions facilitate 3-month-olds’ recognition of an individual face

The current study examined whether and how the presence of a positive or a negative emotional expression may affect the face recognition process at 3 months of age. Using a familiarization procedure, Experiment 1 demonstrated that positive (i.e., happiness), but not negative (i.e., fear and anger) facial expressions facilitate infants’ ability to recognize an individual face. Experiment 2 showed that the advantage of positive over negative facial expressions is driven by the processing of salient features inherent in the happy expression, rather than by the processing of the configural information conveyed by the entire happy face. Overall, these results support the presence of a mutual interaction between face identity and emotion recognition.

Difficulty in disengaging from threat and temperamental negative affectivity in early life: a longitudinal study of infants aged 12-36 months

Background

Attention disengagement is reportedly influenced by perceiving a fearful facial expression even in the first year of life. In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in disengaging from fearful expressions predict temperamental negative affectivity.

Method

Twenty-six infants were studied longitudinally at 12, 18, 24, and 36 months, using an overlap paradigm and two temperament questionnaires: the Japanese versions of the revised Infant Behavior Questionnaire and Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire.

Results

The infants fixated significantly more frequently to fearful than to happy or neutral faces. The attentional bias to threat (i.e., the number of fixed responses on fearful faces divided by the total number of fixed responses on faces) at 12 months was significantly positively correlated with negative affect at 12 months, and its relations with negative affect measured later in development was in the expected positive direction at each age. In addition, a moderation analysis indicates that the orienting network and not the executive network marginally moderated the relation between early attentional bias and later fear.

Conclusions

The results suggest that at 12 months, infants with more negative affectivity exhibit greater difficulty in disengaging their attention from fearful faces. We also found evidence that the association between parent-reported fear and disengagement might be modulated in the second year, perhaps because of the differences in temperamental control networks.