Value-driven anticipatory looking to emotional faces in 8-month-old infants

Developmental studies have adopted preferential-looking paradigms to investigate infant interest in emotional face stimuli. However, because of the attention-grabbing nature of threatening stimuli, research has reported inconsistent results regarding infants' fixation on happy and angry faces. A recent value-based framework of social looking behavior suggested that infants' looking behavior depends on the value of looking (i.e., the expected reward value of a specific looking behavior). Using anticipatory-looking tests alongside preferential-looking tests, we aimed to investigate whether or not infants' looking behavior to faces is value driven. A total of thirty-two 8-month-old infants completed an eye-tracking study. In each block, two faces displaying a combination of happy, neutral, or angry expressions were repeatedly presented side-by-side on the screen. A block consisted of a preferential-looking test and four trials of an anticipatory-looking test. The results of the preferential-looking test showed longer durations of total fixation at the happy and angry faces than the neutral face. In the anticipatory-looking test, infants predictively looked at the position of the happy face compared with the positions of the neutral and angry faces. Furthermore, infants predictively looked at the position of the neutral face more than that of the angry face. A control study using inverted faces indicated that these emotion effects were not due to low-level stimulus differences. Our findings suggest that infants focus on facial stimuli that are affectively arousing regardless of their valence, while anticipatory-looking behavior depends on the value of looking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).