Attention during Visual Preference Tasks: Relation to Caregiving and Face Recognition

This research examined how caregiver experience (female primary caregiver or distributed caregiving with mom and dad) influenced 10-, 14-, and 16-month-olds' visual preferences and attention toward internal facial features of female-male face pairs, and how these behaviors related to novelty preferences in a face recognition task and speed and accuracy on a visual search task. In the visual preference task, infants visually preferred male faces, regardless of caregiver experience. Despite similarities in visual preferences, infants' attention toward females and males' internal facial features was related for infants with distributed caregiving only. Infants' performance across face processing tasks most often correlated for those with female primary caregivers. Results further our understanding of how infants with female primary caregivers display specialized processing of female faces, and how infants with distributed caregiving show similarities in their attention to female and male facial features.