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Developmental patterns of affective attention across the first 2 years of life

Lori B Reider1, Laura Bierstedt1, Jessica L Burris1

  • 1Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA.

Child Development
|July 29, 2022
PubMed

Insights

Infants

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Infant attention studies

Background:

  • Early attention patterns shape cognitive development.
  • Understanding infant attention to emotional cues is crucial for developmental trajectories.
  • Affect-biased attention emerges in infancy.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate longitudinal changes in infant attention to emotional faces.
  • To examine how vigilance, engagement, and disengagement with affective stimuli develop.
  • To identify developmental trajectories of affect-biased attention in early childhood.

Main Methods:

  • Longitudinal study with 357 typically developing infants.
  • Utilized two eye-tracking tasks to measure attention.
  • Assessed attention at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age.

Main Results:

  • Infants showed increased speed in detecting angry faces compared to neutral faces over 2 years.
  • Infants spent more time engaging with angry faces than neutral faces.
  • Demonstrated a developmental shift in attention toward negative emotional stimuli.

Conclusions:

  • Infant attention becomes increasingly biased toward negative emotional stimuli in the first two years.
  • These findings contribute to understanding the development of affect-biased attention.
  • Early attention patterns may predict later socio-emotional development.

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