Visual search and attention to faces during early infancy

Abstract

Newborn babies look preferentially at faces and face-like displays; yet over the course of their first year, much changes about both the way infants process visual stimuli and how they allocate their attention to the social world. Despite this initial preference for faces in restricted contexts, the amount that infants look at faces increases considerably in the first year. Is this development related to changes in attentional orienting abilities? We explored this possibility by showing 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds engaging animated and live-action videos of social stimuli and additionally measuring their visual search performance with both moving and static search displays. Replicating previous findings, looking at faces increased with age; in addition, the amount of looking at faces was strongly related to the youngest infants’ performance in visual search. These results suggest that infants’ attentional abilities may be an important factor facilitating their social attention early in development.

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“…These findings were highly consistent across two separate sessions. As saccadic search appears to be above chance in 10-month-old infants, visual search displays are indeed suitable for investigating the development of saccadic search in infancy Frank et al, 2014;Schlesinger, Amso, & Johnson, 2007). However, as the empirical chance level was higher than what previous studies theoretically expected, we suggest that future studies always report a proper baseline condition when participants cannot be instructed to perform a visual search task.…”

“…These two remaining questions are addressed in the first question of the present study, and its components: In the present study, we aim to answer this question with an experiment in a group of 10-month-old infants. Given that Frank et al (2014) concluded above-chance target localization for infants between 3 and 9 months old, we hypothesize that infants at 10 months should also search for a discrepant item in the absence of instructions.…”

“…The average time to target hit (the first time the target was fixated) for the static target was around 1400-1500 ms, compared to roughly 1100 ms for the moving target. Frank, Amso, & Johnson (2014) employed the same visual search displays for 3, 6, and 9-month-old infants, and report that the proportion of target hits -defined as fixation of the target location, measured with an eye tracker -in the static trials increases from roughly 25 to 40% from 3 to 9 months. For the trials containing moving targets, the proportion of target hits increases from roughly 55 to 100%.…”

“…While ; Frank et al (2014) conclude that infants indeed search for a target, even in the absence of instructions, there are two questions that need to be further addressed. First, given that there were 8 possible target locations, expected infants to locate the target by chance in 12.5% of the cases.…”

“…The second question that remains from ;Frank et al (2014), is whether time to target localization (as determined by the time from trial onset to target fixation) depends on the dissimilarity between targets and non-targets. When a target cannot be localized at first glance and a saccade (or multiple) is required, there are multiple aspects that may determine search performance.…”