Look up to the body: An eye-tracking investigation of 7-months-old infants’ visual exploration of emotional body expressions

Seven‐months‐old infants show increased arousal to static emotion body expressions: Evidence from pupil dilation

“…As an exploratory analysis, we tested whether there was a correlation between pupil dilation within the significant time period (Figure 2d) and the four fixation parameters reported in the earlier analyses (Geangu & Vuong, 2020). These parameters included: (1) proportion fixations; (2) proportion looking time for the 4-s stimulus presentation; (3) fixation duration for fixations; and (4) number of fixations (see Geangu & Vuong, 2020, for full details).…”

“…This analysis was conducted for fixations on the upper body region, which included the arms and hands, and excluded the head region. The motivation for this approach is that 7-months-old infants were found to fixate on the upper body region for discriminating fear body expressions from the other expressions (Geangu & Vuong, 2020). Table 1 presents the Pearson r for these analyses.…”

“…Although our findings provide evidence that infants process the emotional content of body expressions rather than only perceptually discriminate them, there are a number of limitations that should be considered. First, different dependent variables from the same sample were analyzed across Geangu and Vuong (2020) and this paper (fixation and pupil variables), which inflates Type I experiment-wise error rates. Although we corrected for multiple comparisons for our main pupil analysis (Figure 2), correcting for eye-movement and pupil analyses (at the experiment level) may be too conservative and lead to Type II errors.…”

“…Despite the variety of perceptual cues for emotions, most infancy research focuses on faces (Bayet & Nelson, 2019;Geangu, Ichikawa, et al, 2016;van den Boomen et al, 2021). There is, however, a growing number of studies using a variety of neural and behavioral paradigms which provide evidence that infants can discriminate perceptual cues related to the emotional content of dynamic and static body expressions by 7 months old (Geangu & Vuong, 2020;Heck et al, 2018;Hock et al, 2017;Missana et al, 2014Ogren et al, 2019;Zieber et al, 2014). For example, Missana et al (2014) found larger event-related potential (ERP) responses to fear compared to happy body expressions in 8-months-old infants in an early N290 component (i.e., a negative deflection around 290 ms after stimulus onset).…”

Three- and Six-Year-Old Children are Sensitive to Natural Body Expressions of Emotion: An ERP Emotional Priming Study

“…Previous work shows that from infancy to adulthood, observers can use different sensory information-including form (e.g., body postures, static facial expressions), motion (e.g., full body or body part articulations) or auditory (e.g., vocal expressions) cues-to extract emotional and socially-relevant information related to emotions (e.g., Bayet et al, 2018;Crespo-Llado et al, 2018a,b;Gao & Maurer, 2009;Geangu et al, 2015, 2016a Geangu & Vuong, 2020;Poulin-Dubois et al, 2018;Yeh et al, 2016;Zieber et al, 2014). These studies used a variety of complementary measures including behaviour, eye fixations, and physiological and electrophysiological responses.…”