Endogenous Control and Reward-Based Mechanisms Shape Infants’ Attention Biases to Caregiver Faces

Abstract

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 whether these attention biases reflect caregivers’ social reward value. To address these questions, we measured 4- to 10-month-old infants’ frequency of orienting and duration of looking to caregiver and stranger faces within multi-item arrays. We also assessed whether infants’ attention to faces related to individual differences in Surgency, an index of reward sensitivity. Attention biases to faces were more robust among older infants and when only one face appeared in the array compared to trials in which the faces appeared in direct competition, suggesting a role of endogenous attention control. Infants did not show biased attention to caregivers as a group, but individual differences in reward sensitivity related to orienting and duration of looking to caregivers. Overall, these results suggest that infants’ early attention biases to caregiver faces reflect both developing attention control skills and reward-based attention mechanisms.