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Three-month-old infants show enhanced behavioral and neural sensitivity to fearful faces

Kristina Safar1, Margaret C Moulson2

  • 1Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Diagnostic Imaging, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Neurosciences and Mental Health Program, Research Institute, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
|February 20, 2020
PubMed

Insights

Three-month-old infants show a preference for fearful faces, indicating early perceptual sensitivity. This finding suggests the beginnings of an attentional bias for fear in infancy.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Infant perception

Background:

  • Infant emotion recognition involves attentional biases for fearful faces.
  • The developmental timeline for this sensitivity is debated.
  • Early detection of fear cues is crucial for infant development and safety.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 3-month-old infants exhibit differential behavioral and neural responses to happy versus fearful faces.
  • To determine the developmental onset of sensitivity to fearful facial expressions.
  • To explore the early perceptual processing of emotions in infants.

Main Methods:

  • A behavioral visual preference task was used to assess infant looking time.
  • An event-related potential (ERP) task measured neural responses to emotional faces.
  • Sixty-nine 3-month-old infants participated in the study.

Main Results:

  • Infants demonstrated a significant visual preference for fearful faces over happy faces.
  • Differential neural activity was observed in occipitotemporal regions (N290, P400) associated with face perception.
  • No significant differential neural responding was found in frontocentral regions linked to attention (Nc).

Conclusions:

  • Three-month-olds possess an early perceptual sensitivity to fearful faces.
  • This perceptual sensitivity may precede the development of a more robust attentional bias in later infancy.
  • Further research on the ontogeny of fear perception is needed to understand its link to developmental outcomes.

Keywords:
Attentional biasEmotionEvent-related potentialsFacial expressions of emotionFearInfancy

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