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The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective
Greg D Reynolds1, Kelly C Roth1
1Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, United States.
Frontiers in Psychology
|March 16, 2018
Summary
Infants show an early bias for faces, developing preferences for familiar individuals and native-language stimuli through experience and neural development. This attentional bias shapes social-cognitive processing.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Comparative Psychology
Background:
- Infants exhibit an innate preference for face-like stimuli shortly after birth.
- Early experiences shape face processing, leading to perceptual narrowing and specialized responsiveness.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review factors influencing the development of attentional biases towards faces in early development.
- To examine the interplay of experience, neural development, and attention in face processing.
Main Methods:
- Integrative review of behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroscience research in infants.
- Inclusion of comparative research with animal models.
- Analysis of developmental changes in neural responsiveness to faces.
Main Results:
- Newborns show a visual preference for faces over non-face stimuli.
- Infants develop enhanced processing for familiar faces (mother, own-race, native-language).
- Auditory and visual stimuli influence neural responsiveness to faces.
Conclusions:
- Attentional biases for faces emerge from a combination of internal factors (neural development, arousal) and external experiences.
- These biases are crucial for enhanced processing of frequently encountered faces.
- Developmental Systems Theory provides a framework for understanding these complex interactions.
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