Visual Attention to Emotional Faces in Children: An Eye-Tracking Study of Social Visual Attention

Visual attention to emotional faces provides a useful framework for investigating orienting, visual exploration, and attentional engagement across development. The present study aimed to characterize the visuospatial organization of attention in neurotypical children and to examine how this pattern is modulated by social and emotional factors. Twenty children (aged 8-12 years) participated in a passive viewing paradigm of facial expressions while their eye movements were recorded using eye tracking (120 Hz).

Oculomotor metrics based on areas of interest (eyes, mouth, nose, face, and non-social regions) were analyzed, including time to first fixation (TTFF), number of fixations (NF), and total fixation duration (TFD), as well as total saccade count as a global index of visual scanning.

Results indicated statistically significant AOI-dependent interactions involving emotional expression, observer sex, stimulus sex, and stimulus race/ethnicity, revealing region-specific modulation of visual attention. Consistently, prioritization of the eye region was observed, particularly for angry expressions, and was associated with greater fixation recurrence and duration, whereas happy and surprised expressions were associated with increased attentional allocation to the mouth. Differences related to observer sex and stimulus characteristics reflected region-specific modulations. In contrast, global saccadic dynamics remained relatively stable across experimental conditions and showed no significant effects of observer sex, stimulus sex, race/ethnicity, or emotional expression.

Taken together, these findings suggest that visual attention to emotional faces in childhood follows a relatively stable spatial organization characterized by preferential processing of the eye region and region-specific modulation associated with emotional expression and stimulus characteristics.