Leppänen Jukka M
University of Tampere.
Child Dev Perspect. 2016 Sep;10(3):161-165. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12180. Epub 2016 Apr 15.
Infants have a natural tendency to look at adults' faces, possibly to help initiate vital interactions with caregivers during sensitive periods of development. Recent studies using eye-tracking technologies have identified the mechanisms that underlie infants' capacity to orient and hold attention on faces. These studies have shown that the bias for faces is weak in young infants, but becomes more robust and resistant to distraction during the second half of the 1st year. This development is apparently related to more general changes in infants' attention and control of eye movement. As a tractable and reproducible aspect of infant behavior, the attention bias for faces can be used to examine the neural correlates of attention and may be a way to monitor early neurodevelopment in infants.
婴儿天生就有看向成年人面孔的倾向，这可能有助于在发育的敏感时期与照顾者展开重要互动。最近使用眼动追踪技术的研究已经确定了婴儿对面孔进行定向和保持注意力的潜在机制。这些研究表明，小婴儿对面孔的偏好较弱，但在出生后的下半年会变得更强且更能抵抗干扰。这种发展显然与婴儿注意力和眼球运动控制方面更普遍的变化有关。作为婴儿行为中易于处理且可重复的一个方面，对面孔的注意力偏好可用于研究注意力的神经关联，并且可能是监测婴儿早期神经发育的一种方式。
