Inhibiting saccades to a social stimulus: a developmental study

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Faces serve as crucial social signals throughout life.
• In adults, faces gain prioritized access to the orienting system.
• The developmental emergence of this face-specific orienting effect is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate when the prioritized orienting to faces emerges during development.
• To examine age-related differences in processing social vs. non-social visual stimuli.
• To explore the interplay between executive control development and social stimulus processing.

Main Methods:

• A mixed pro- and anti-saccades task was administered to 139 participants across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
• Visual targets included faces, cars, and noise patterns.
• Performance metrics included error rates and reaction times (latencies).

Main Results:

• Overall performance improved until approximately 15 years of age.
• Adults made more direction errors for faces compared to abstract patterns and cars.
• Adolescents showed increased errors for faces versus cars, while children did not differentiate between faces and cars or noise patterns.
• Pro-saccade latencies were consistently faster towards faces across all age groups.

Conclusions:

• The prioritized processing of faces emerges during adolescence, coinciding with developing executive functions.
• Social stimuli like faces exert a distinct influence on visual orienting that changes with age.
• Understanding these developmental trajectories is key to comprehending social cognition and executive control.