The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective

Abstract

We present an integrative review of research and theory on major factors involved in the early development of attentional biases to faces. Research utilizing behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroscience measures with infant participants as well as comparative research with animal subjects are reviewed. We begin with coverage of research demonstrating the presence of an attentional bias for faces shortly after birth, such as newborn infants' visual preference for face-like over non-face stimuli. The role of experience and the process of perceptual narrowing in face processing are examined as infants begin to demonstrate enhanced behavioral and neural responsiveness to mother over stranger, female over male, own- over other-race, and native over non-native faces. Next, we cover research on developmental change in infants' neural responsiveness to faces in multimodal contexts, such as audiovisual speech. We also explore the potential influence of arousal and attention on early perceptual preferences for faces. Lastly, the potential influence of the development of attention systems in the brain on social-cognitive processing is discussed. In conclusion, we interpret the findings under the framework of Developmental Systems Theory, emphasizing the combined and distributed influence of several factors, both internal (e.g., arousal, neural development) and external (e.g., early social experience) to the developing child, in the emergence of attentional biases that lead to enhanced responsiveness and processing of faces commonly encountered in the native environment.

Keywords: attentional biases; event-related potentials; infancy; perceptual processing; social development.

FIGURE 1

The Nc component associated with infant visual attention is shown at midline central electrode clusters for 9-month-old infants in response to presentations of monkey faces that were either: familiar faces shown during an initial learning phase (first 20 trials), novel monkey faces from a different species than those seen in the learning phase (novel-other), or novel faces from the same species as those seen during the learning phase (novel-same). The midline central electrode cluster used in the analyses is indicated in the sensor net layout shown to the left. The shaded rectangle indicates the time window for the analysis of Nc. Time following stimulus onset is shown on the X-axis, and change in amplitude of the ERP (in microvolts) is shown on the Y-axis (Figure adapted from Dixon et al., 2017).

FIGURE 2

The LSW is shown for early (bold line) and late (dashed line) blocks of trials at right anterior temporal electrodes. Waveforms from the synchronous audiovisual condition are shown in the right panel, and waveforms from the asynchronous audiovisual condition are shown in the left panel. The Y-axis represents the amplitude of the ERP in microvolts, and the X-axis represents time following stimulus onset. The time-window of the component analysis is shaded on the X-axis. The positioning of the electrodes included in the analysis are shown in the bottom panel (Figure adapted from Reynolds et al., 2014).