Using Eye Tracking to Understand Infants' Attentional Bias for Faces

Endogenous Control and Reward-based Mechanisms Shape Infants' Attention Biases to Caregiver Faces

Infants rely on developing attention skills to identify relevant stimuli in their environments. Although caregivers are socially rewarding and a critical source of information, they are also one of many stimuli that compete for infants' attention. Young infants preferentially hold attention on caregiver faces, but it is unknown whether they also preferentially orient to caregivers and the extent to which these attention biases reflect reward-based attention mechanisms. To address these questions, we measured 4- to 10-month-old infants' (N = 64) frequency of orienting and duration of looking to caregiver and stranger faces within multi-item arrays. We also assessed whether infants' attention to these faces related to individual differences in Surgency, an indirect index of reward sensitivity. Although infants did not show biased attention to caregiver versus stranger faces at the group level, infants were increasingly biased to orient to stranger faces with age and infants with higher Surgency scores showed more robust attention orienting and attention holding biases to caregiver faces. These effects varied based on the selective attention demands of the task, suggesting that infants' attention biases to caregiver faces may reflect both developing attention control skills and reward-based attention mechanisms.

Exposure to the parents' speech is positively associated with preterm infant's face preference

BACKGROUND

The parents' presence and involvement in neonatal care is a promising approach to improve preterm infants' neurodevelopmental outcomes. We examined whether exposure to the parents' speech is associated with the preterm infant's social-cognitive development.

METHODS

The study included infants born before 32 gestational weeks in two neonatal units. Each infant's language environment was assessed from 16-hour recordings using Language Environment Analysis (LENA®). Parental presence was assessed with Closeness Diary for 14 days during the hospital stay. Attention to faces and non-face patterns was measured at the corrected age of seven months using an eye-tracking disengagement test.

RESULTS

A total of 63 preterm infants were included. Infants were less likely to disengage their attention from faces (M = 0.55, SD = 0.26) than non-face patterns (M = 0.24, SD = 0.22), p < 0.001, d = 0.84. Exposure to the parents' speech during the neonatal period was positively correlated with the preference for faces over non-face patterns (rs = 0.34, p = 0.009) and with the preference for parents over unfamiliar faces (rs = 0.28, p = 0.034).

CONCLUSION

The exposure to the parents' speech during neonatal hospital care is a potential early marker for later social development in preterm infants.

IMPACT

The exposure to the parents' speech during neonatal intensive care is a potential early marker for optimal social-cognitive development in preterm infants. This is the first study to show an association between parental vocal contact during neonatal intensive care and early social development (i.e., face preference), measured at seven months of corrected age. Our findings suggest that we should pay attention to the parents' vocal contact with their child in the neonatal intensive care unit and identify need for tailored support for face-to-face and vocal contact.

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12-to 20-month old infants

The development of empathy and prosocial behavior begins in infancy and is likely supported by emotion processing skills. The current study explored whether early emerging deficits in emotion processing are associated with disruptions in the development of empathy and prosociality. We investigated this question in a large, diverse sample of 147, 11- to 20-month-old infants (42% female; 61% Black; 67% low socioeconomic status). Infants completed two observational tasks assessing prosocial helping and one task assessing empathy and prosocial comforting behavior. Infants also completed an eye-tracking task assessing engagement and disengagement with negative emotional faces. Infants who attended less to angry, sad, and fearful faces (i.e., by being slower to look at and/or quicker to look away from negative compared to neutral faces) engaged in fewer helping behaviors, and effect sizes were larger when examining infants' attention toward the eye regions of faces. Additionally, infants who were quicker to look away from the eye regions of angry faces, but not the whole face, displayed less empathy and comforting behaviors. Results suggest that as early as 12 months of age, infants' decreased attention toward negative emotional faces, particularly the eye regions, is associated with less empathy and prosociality during a developmental period in which these abilities are rapidly maturing.

6- to 10-year-old children do not show race-based orienting biases to faces during an online attention capture task

Research has established that frequency of exposure to own- and other-race faces shapes the development of face processing biases characterized by enhanced attention to and recognition of more familiar own-race faces, that is, the other-race effect (ORE). The ORE is first evident during infancy based on differences in looking to own- versus other-race faces and is later assessed based on recognition memory task performance during childhood and adulthood. Using these measures, researchers have found that race-based face processing biases initially develop during infancy but remain sensitive to experiences with own- and other-race faces through childhood. In contrast, limited work suggests that infants' attention orienting may be less affected by frequency of exposure to own- and other-race faces. However, the plasticity of race-based face processing biases during childhood suggests that biased orienting to own-race faces may develop at later ages following continued exposure to these faces. We addressed this question by examining 6- to 10-year-old children's attention capture by own- and other-race faces during an online task. Children searched for a target among multiple distractors. During some trials, either an own- or other-race face appeared as one of the distractors. Children showed similar target detection performance (omission errors, accuracy, and response times) regardless of whether an own- or other-race face appeared as a distractor. These results differ from research demonstrating race-based biases in attention holding and recognition memory but converge with previous infant research suggesting that attention orienting might not be as strongly affected by frequency of exposure to race-based information during development.

Eye movements and ERP biomarkers for face processing problems in avoidant attachment-style individuals

Background

Avoidant attachment poses a serious risk to intimate relationships and offspring. However, there are few studies on the face-processing characteristics and impairments of avoidant individuals based on basic emotion theory. Therefore, this study investigated the issues of emotional processing and deactivation strategies in individuals with avoidant attachment.

Methods

Avoidant and secure individuals were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment and a two-choice oddball task in which they had to distinguish facial expressions of basic emotions (sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral). Eye fixation durations to various parts of the face, including the eyes, nose, and mouth, were measured, and three event-related potentials (ERP) components (P100, N170, and P300) were monitored.

Results

Avoidant individuals could not process facial expressions as easily as secure individuals. Avoidant individuals focused less on the eyes of angry faces when compared to secure individuals. They also exhibited a more positive P100 component and a less negative N170 component when processing faces and a larger amplitude of the P300 component than secure individuals when processing emotional expressions.

Conclusion

Avoidant individuals use deactivating strategies and exhibit specific characteristics at different stages, which are of great significance in social interaction.

Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups.

Infant negative affectivity and patterns of affect-biased attention

Biased attention toward affective cues often cooccurs with the emergence and maintenance of internalizing disorders. However, few studies have assessed whether affect-biased attention in infancy relates to early indicators of psychopathological risk, such as negative affectivity. The current study evaluates whether negative affectivity relates to affect-biased attention in 6-month-old infants. Affect-biased attention was assessed via a free-viewing eye-tracking task in which infants were presented with a series of face pairs (comprised of a happy, angry, or sad face and a neutral face). Attention was quantified with metrics of both attention orienting and attention holding. Overall, infants showed no differences in attention orienting (i.e., speed of looking) or attention holding (i.e., duration of looking) toward emotional faces in comparison to the neutral face pairs. Negative affectivity, assessed via parent report, did not relate to attention orienting but was associated with biased attention toward positive, happy faces and away from threat-cueing, angry faces in comparison to the neutral faces they were paired with. These findings suggest that negative affectivity is associated with differences in attention holding, but not initial orienting toward emotional faces; biases which have important implications for the trajectory of socioemotional development.

The Components of Interpersonal Synchrony in the Typical Population and in Autism: A Conceptual Analysis

Interpersonal synchrony - the tendency for social partners to temporally co-ordinate their behaviour when interacting - is a ubiquitous feature of social interactions. Synchronous interactions play a key role in development, and promote social bonding and a range of pro-social behavioural outcomes across the lifespan. The process of achieving and maintaining interpersonal synchrony is highly complex, with inputs required from across perceptual, temporal, motor, and socio-cognitive domains. In this conceptual analysis, we synthesise evidence from across these domains to establish the key components underpinning successful non-verbal interpersonal synchrony, how such processes interact, and factors that may moderate their operation. We also consider emerging evidence that interpersonal synchrony is reduced in autistic populations. We use our account of the components contributing to interpersonal synchrony in the typical population to identify potential points of divergence in interpersonal synchrony in autism. The relationship between interpersonal synchrony and broader aspects of social communication in autism are also considered, together with implications for future research.

The Bidirectional Social-Cognitive Mechanisms of the Social-Attention Symptoms of Autism

Differences in social attention development begin to be apparent in the 6th to 12th month of development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and theoretically reflect important elements of its neurodevelopmental endophenotype. This paper examines alternative conceptual views of these early social attention symptoms and hypotheses about the mechanisms involved in their development. One model emphasizes mechanism involved in the spontaneous allocation of attention to faces, or social orienting. Alternatively, another model emphasizes mechanisms involved in the coordination of attention with other people, or joint attention, and the socially bi-directional nature of its development. This model raises the possibility that atypical responses of children to the attention or the gaze of a social partner directed toward themselves may be as important in the development of social attention symptoms as differences in the development of social orienting. Another model holds that symptoms of social attention may be important to early development, but may not impact older individuals with ASD. The alterative model is that the social attention symptoms in infancy (social orienting and joint attention), and social cognitive symptoms in childhood and adulthood share common neurodevelopmental substrates. Therefore, differences in early social attention and later social cognition constitute a developmentally continuous axis of symptom presentation in ASD. However, symptoms in older individuals may be best measured with in vivo measures of efficiency of social attention and social cognition in social interactions rather than the accuracy of response on analog tests used in measures with younger children. Finally, a third model suggests that the social attention symptoms may not truly be a symptom of ASD. Rather, they may be best conceptualized as stemming from differences domain general attention and motivation mechanisms. The alternative argued for here that infant social attention symptoms meet all the criteria of a unique dimension of the phenotype of ASD and the bi-directional phenomena involved in social attention cannot be fully explained in terms of domain general aspects of attention development.

The Transdiagnostic Origins of Anxiety and Depression During the Pediatric Period: Linking NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Constructs to Ecological Systems

In the last decade, an abundance of research has utilized the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework to examine mechanisms underlying anxiety and depression in youth. However, relatively little work has examined how these mechanistic intrapersonal processes intersect with context during childhood and adolescence. The current paper covers reviews and meta-analyses that have linked RDoC-relevant constructs to ecological systems in internalizing problems in youth. Specifically, cognitive, biological, and affective factors within the RDoC framework were examined. Based on these reviews and some of the original empirical research they cover, we highlight the integral role of ecological factors to the RDoC framework in predicting onset and maintenance of internalizing problems in youth. Specific recommendations are provided for researchers using the RDoC framework to inform future research integrating ecological systems and development. We advocate for future research and research funding to focus on better integration of the environment and development into the RDoC framework.

Pupil responses to dynamic negative facial expressions of emotion in infants and parents

Observing others' emotions triggers physiological arousal in infants as well as in adults, reflected in dilated pupil sizes. This study is the first to examine parents' and infants' pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional facial expressions. Moreover, the links between pupil responses and negative emotional dispositions were explored among infants and parents. Infants' and one of their parent's pupil responses to negative versus neutral faces were measured via eye tracking in 222 infants (5- to 7-month-olds, n = 77, 11- to 13-month-olds, n = 78, and 17- to 19-month-olds, n = 67) and 229 parents. One parent contributed to the pupil data, whereas both parents were invited to fill in questionnaires on their own and their infant's negative emotional dispositions. Infants did not differentially respond to negative expressions, while parents showed stronger pupil responses to negative versus neutral expressions. There was a positive association between infants' and their parent's mean pupil responses and significant links between mothers' and fathers' stress levels and their infants' pupil responses. We conclude that a direct association between pupil responses in parents and offspring is observable already in infancy in typical development. Stress in parents is related to their infants' pupillary arousal to negative emotions.

Prenatal Glucocorticoid-Exposed Infants Do Not Show an Age-Typical Fear Bias at 8 Months of Age - Preliminary Findings From the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study

Synthetic glucocorticoids (sGC) are frequently administered to pregnant women at risk for preterm delivery to promote fetal lung maturation. Despite their undeniable beneficial effects in lung maturation, the impact of these hormones on developing brain is less clear. Recent human studies suggest that emotional and behavioral disorders are more common among sGC-exposed vs. non-exposed children, but the literature is sparse and controversial. We investigated if prenatal sGC exposure altered fear bias, a well-established infant attention phenotype, at 8-months. We used eye tracking and an overlap paradigm with control, neutral, happy, and fearful faces, and salient distractors, to evaluate infants’ attention disengagement from faces, and specifically from fearful vs. neutral and happy faces (i.e., a fear bias) in a sample (N = 363) of general population from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. sGC exposed infants (N = 12) did not differ from non-exposed infants (N = 351) in their overall probability of disengagement in any single stimulus condition. However, in comparison with non-exposed infants, they did not show the age-typical fear bias and this association remained after controlling for confounding factors such as prematurity, gestational age at birth, birth weight, sex, and maternal postnatal depressive symptoms. Prenatal sGC exposure may alter emotional processing in infants. The atypical emotion processing in turn may be a predictor of emotional problems later in development. Future longitudinal studies are needed in order to evaluate the long-term consequences of sGC exposure for the developing brain.

Odor-driven face-like categorization in the human infant brain

Understanding how the young infant brain starts to categorize the flurry of ambiguous sensory inputs coming in from its complex environment is of primary scientific interest. Here, we test the hypothesis that senses other than vision play a key role in initiating complex visual categorizations in 20 4-mo-old infants exposed either to a baseline odor or to their mother's odor while their electroencephalogram (EEG) is recorded. Various natural images of objects are presented at a 6-Hz rate (six images/second), with face-like object configurations of the same object categories (i.e., eliciting face pareidolia in adults) interleaved every sixth stimulus (i.e., 1 Hz). In the baseline odor context, a weak neural categorization response to face-like stimuli appears at 1 Hz in the EEG frequency spectrum over bilateral occipitotemporal regions. Critically, this face-like-selective response is magnified and becomes right lateralized in the presence of maternal body odor. This reveals that nonvisual cues systematically associated with human faces in the infant's experience shape the interpretation of face-like configurations as faces in the right hemisphere, dominant for face categorization. At the individual level, this intersensory influence is particularly effective when there is no trace of face-like categorization in the baseline odor context. These observations provide evidence for the early tuning of face-(like)-selective activity from multisensory inputs in the developing brain, suggesting that perceptual development integrates information across the senses for efficient category acquisition, with early maturing systems such as olfaction driving the acquisition of categories in later-developing systems such as vision.

Influence of personality traits on users’ viewing behaviour

Different views on the role of personal factors in moderating individual viewing behaviour exist. This study examined the impact of personality traits on individual viewing behaviour of facial stimulus. A total of 96 students (46 males and 50 females, age 23–28 years) were participated in this study. The Big-Five personality traits of all the participants together with data related to their eye-movements were collected and analysed. The results showed three groups of users who scored high on the personality traits of neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Individuals who scored high in a specific personality trait were more probably to interpret the visual image differently from individuals with other personality traits. To determine the extent to which a specific personality trait is associated with users’ viewing behaviour of visual stimulus, a predictive model was developed and validated. The prediction results showed that 96.73% of the identified personality traits can potentially be predicted by the viewing behaviour of users. The findings of this study can expand the current understanding of human personality and choice behaviour. The study also contributes to the perceptual encoding process of faces and the perceptual mechanism in the holistic face processing theory.

Associations between individual variations in visual attention at 9 months and behavioral competencies at 18 months in rural Malawi

Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that individual differences in infant visual attention correlate with variations in cognitive skills later in childhood. Here we tested this hypothesis in infants from rural Malawi (n = 198-377, depending on analysis), who were assessed with eye tracking tests of visual orienting, anticipatory looks, and attention to faces at 9 months, and more conventional tests of cognitive control (A-not-B), motor, language, and socioemotional development at 18 months. The results showed no associations between measures of infant attention at 9 months and cognitive skills at 18 months, either in analyses linking infant visual orienting with broad cognitive outcomes or analyses linking specific constructs between the two time points (i.e., switching of anticipatory looks and manual reaching responses), as correlations varied between -0.08 and 0.14. Measures of physical growth, and family socioeconomic characteristics were also not correlated with cognitive outcomes at 18 months in the current sample (correlations between -0.10 and 0.19). The results do not support the use of the current tests of infant visual attention as a predictive tool for 18-month-old infants' cognitive skills in the Malawian setting. The results are discussed in light of the potential limitations of the employed infant tests as well as potentially unique characteristics of early cognitive development in low-resource settings.

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.

Differential sensitivity to species- and race-based information in the development of attention orienting and attention holding face biases in infancy

Experience-based biases in face processing can reflect both attention orienting biases that support efficient selection of faces from competing stimuli and attention holding biases that allow for detailed encoding of selected faces. It is well established that infants demonstrate both species- and race-based biases in attention holding. Fewer studies have found species-based, but not race-based, orienting biases in infancy but these studies examined species- and race-based biases separately and measured overall orienting without examining attention to distractors. The present study directly compared 6- and 11-month-old infants' species- and race-based biases in attention holding and orienting to faces. We measured infants' duration of looking and frequency/speed of orienting to own-race, other-race, and monkey faces in multi-item search arrays, and their frequency of orienting to faces and distractors during search. Infants showed expected species- and race-based biases in attention holding but only a species-based bias in overall orienting. However, they also showed reduced orienting to salient distractors in the context of own-race faces. These results suggest that orienting mechanisms mediating face selection are robustly driven by species information while orienting to faces versus distractors during search may also reflect prior learning about frequently experienced own-race faces.

Newborn left amygdala volume associates with attention disengagement from fearful faces at eight months

After 5 months of age, infants begin to prioritize attention to fearful over other facial expressions. One key proposition is that amygdala and related early-maturing subcortical network, is important for emergence of this attentional bias - however, empirical data to support these assertions are lacking. In this prospective longitudinal study, we measured amygdala volumes from MR images in 65 healthy neonates at 2-5 weeks of gestation corrected age and attention disengagement from fearful vs. non-fearful facial expressions at 8 months with eye tracking. Overall, infants were less likely to disengage from fearful than happy/neutral faces, demonstrating an age-typical bias for fear. Left, but not right, amygdala volume (corrected for intracranial volume) was positively associated with the likelihood of disengaging attention from fearful faces to a salient lateral distractor (r = .302, p = .014). No association was observed with the disengagement from neutral or happy faces in equivalent conditions (r = .166 and .125, p = .186 and .320, respectively). These results are the first to link the amygdala volume with the emerging perceptual vigilance for fearful faces during infancy. They suggest a link from the prenatally defined variability in the amygdala size to early postnatal emotional and social traits.

Understanding the role and function of maternal touch in children with neurodevelopmental disabilities

During the first years of life, maternal touch can serve different functions including facilitation of child's gaze orientation to faces which is a key precursor for social attention. Although children with neurodevelopmental disability (ND) may have reduced social skills, the role of maternal touch in contributing to gaze orientation to maternal face has not been explored in previous research. In the present study, we investigate the functions of maternal touch in dyads of mothers and children with ND, compared to dyads of children with typical development (TD). Micro-analytic 2-s coding of maternal touch (i.e., affectionate, playful, facilitating, holding, no touch) and children's gaze orientation (i.e., mother-oriented, object-oriented, non-oriented) occurred during 5-minute interactions between mothers and their 12-to-24-month-old ND and TD children. Dyads were paired for children chronological age and sex. Mothers of children with ND used more touch - especially facilitating and holding types -, compared to mothers of TD peers. Children with ND exhibited more non-orientated gaze compared to TD counterparts. Playful touch associated with increased mother-oriented gaze in children with ND, whereas affectionate and holding touch associated with greater mother-oriented gaze in TD children. Findings suggest that specific types of touch support children's attention to social partners.

Caucasian Infants' Attentional Orienting to Own- and Other-Race Faces

Infants show preferential attention toward faces and detect faces embedded within complex naturalistic scenes. Newborn infants are insensitive to race, but rapidly develop differential processing of own- and other-race faces. In the present study, we investigated the development of attentional orienting toward own- and other-race faces embedded within naturalistic scenes. Infants aged six-, nine- and twelve-months did not show differences in the speed of orienting to own- and other race faces, but other-race faces held infants' visual attention for longer. We also found a clear developmental progression in attentional capture and holding, with older infants orienting to faces faster and fixating them for longer. Results are interpreted within the context of the two-process model of face processing.

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.

Infants rapidly detect human faces in complex naturalistic visual scenes

Infants respond preferentially to faces and face-like stimuli from birth, but past research has typically presented faces in isolation or amongst an artificial array of competing objects. In the current study infants aged 3- to 12-months viewed a series of complex visual scenes; half of the scenes contained a person, the other half did not. Infants rapidly detected and oriented to faces in scenes even when they were not visually salient. Although a clear developmental improvement was observed in face detection and interest, all infants displayed sensitivity to the presence of a person in a scene, by displaying eye movements that differed quantifiably across a range of measures when viewing scenes that either did or did not contain a person. We argue that infant's face detection capabilities are ostensibly "better" with naturalistic stimuli and artificial array presentations used in previous studies have underestimated performance.

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.

Early development of visual attention in infants in rural Malawi

Eye tracking research has shown that infants develop a repertoire of attentional capacities during the first year. The majority of studies examining the early development of attention comes from Western, high-resource countries. We examined visual attention in a heterogeneous sample of infants in rural Malawi (N = 312-376, depending on analysis). Infants were assessed with eye-tracking-based tests that targeted visual orienting, anticipatory looking, and attention to faces at 7 and 9 months. Consistent with prior research, infants exhibited active visual search for salient visual targets, anticipatory saccades to predictable events, and a robust attentional bias for happy and fearful faces. Individual variations in these processes had low to moderate odd-even split-half and test-retest reliability. There were no consistent associations between attention measures and gestational age, nutritional status, or characteristics of the rearing environment (i.e., maternal cognition, psychosocial well-being, socioeconomic status, and care practices). The results replicate infants' early attentional biases in a large, unique sample, and suggest that some of these biases (e.g., bias for faces) are pronounced in low-resource settings. The results provided no evidence that the initial manifestation of infants' attentional capacities is associated with risk factors that are common in low-resource environments.

Maternal Depressive Symptoms During the Pre- and Postnatal Periods and Infant Attention to Emotional Faces

We examined how infants' attentional disengagement from happy, fearful, neutral, and phase-scrambled faces at 8 months, as assessed by eye tracking, is associated with trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms from early pregnancy to 6 months postpartum (decreasing n = 48, increasing n = 34, and consistently low symptom levels n = 280). The sample (mother-infant dyads belonging to a larger FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study) was collected between 5/2013-6/2016. The overall disengagement probability from faces to distractors was not related to maternal depressive symptoms, but fear bias was heightened in infants whose mothers reported decreasing or increasing depressive symptoms. Exacerbated attention to fearful faces in infants of mothers with depressive symptoms may be independent of the timing of the symptoms in the pre- and postnatal stages.

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.

Auditory noise increases the allocation of attention to the mouth, and the eyes pay the price: An eye-tracking study

We investigated the effect of auditory noise added to speech on patterns of looking at faces in 40 toddlers. We hypothesised that noise would increase the difficulty of processing speech, making children allocate more attention to the mouth of the speaker to gain visual speech cues from mouth movements. We also hypothesised that this shift would cause a decrease in fixation time to the eyes, potentially decreasing the ability to monitor gaze. We found that adding noise increased the number of fixations to the mouth area, at the price of a decreased number of fixations to the eyes. Thus, to our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating a mouth-eyes trade-off between attention allocated to social cues coming from the eyes and linguistic cues coming from the mouth. We also found that children with higher word recognition proficiency and higher average pupil response had an increased likelihood of fixating the mouth, compared to the eyes and the rest of the screen, indicating stronger motivation to decode the speech.

Changes in infant visual attention when observing repeated actions

Infants' early visual preferences for faces, and their observational learning abilities, are well-established in the literature. The current study examines how infants' attention changes as they become increasingly familiar with a person and the actions that person is demonstrating. The looking patterns of 12- (n = 61) and 16-month-old infants (n = 29) were tracked while they watched videos of an adult presenting novel actions with four different objects three times. A face-to-action ratio in visual attention was calculated for each repetition and summarized as a mean across all videos. The face-to-action ratio increased with each action repetition, indicating that there was an increase in attention to the face relative to the action each additional time the action was demonstrated. Infant's prior familiarity with the object used was related to face-to-action ratio in 12-month-olds and initial looking behavior was related to face-to-action ratio in the whole sample. Prior familiarity with the presenter, and infant gender and age, were not related to face-to-action ratio. This study has theoretical implications for face preference and action observations in dynamic contexts.

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

Try to look on the bright side: Children and adults can (sometimes) override their tendency to prioritize negative faces

We used eye tracking to examine 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 173) visual attention to negative (anger, fear, sadness, disgust) and neutral faces when paired with happy faces in 2 experimental conditions: free-viewing ("look at the faces") and directed ("look only at the happy faces"). Regardless of instruction, all age groups more often looked first to negative versus positive faces (no age differences), suggesting that initial orienting is driven by bottom-up processes. In contrast, biases in more sustained attention-last looks and looking duration-varied by age and could be modified by top-down instruction. On the free-viewing task, all age groups exhibited a negativity bias which attenuated with age and remained stable across trials. When told to look only at happy faces (directed task), all age groups shifted to a positivity bias, with linear age-related improvements. This ability to implement the "look only at the happy faces" instruction, however, fatigued over time, with the decrement stronger for children. Controlling for age, individual differences in executive function (working memory and inhibitory control) had no relation to the free-viewing task; however, these variables explained substantial variance on the directed task, with children and adults higher in executive function showing better skill at looking last and looking longer at happy faces. Greater anxiety predicted more first looks to angry faces on the directed task. These findings advance theory and research on normative development and individual differences in the bias to prioritize negative information, including contributions of bottom-up salience and top-down control. (PsycINFO Database Record

Evidence for spared attention to faces in 7-month-old infants after prenatal exposure to antiepileptic drugs

INTRODUCTION

Prenatal antiepileptic drug (AED) exposure is associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment and autism spectrum disorders detected mainly at the age of two to six years. We examined whether the developmental aberrations associated with prenatal AED exposure could be detected already in infancy and whether effects on visual attention can be observed at this early age.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

We compared a prospective cohort of infants with in utero exposure to AED (n=56) with infants without drug exposures (n=62). The assessments performed at the age of seven months included standardized neurodevelopmental scores (Griffiths Mental Developmental Scale and Hammersmith Infant Neurological Examination) as well as a novel eye-tracking-based test for visual attention and orienting to faces. Background information included prospective collection of AED exposure data, pregnancy outcome, neuropsychological evaluation of the mothers, and information on maternal epilepsy type.

RESULTS

Carbamazepine, oxcarbazepine, and valproate, but not lamotrigine or levetiracetam, were associated with impaired early language abilities at the age of seven months. The general speed of visuospatial orienting or attentional bias for faces measured by eye-tracker-based tests did not differ between AED-exposed and control infants.

DISCUSSION

Our findings support the idea that prenatal AED exposure may impair verbal abilities, and this effect may be detected already in infancy. In contrast, the early development of attention to faces was spared after in utero AED exposure.