Human Information Processing Laboratory, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.
Infant Cognition Laboratory, Tampere Center for Child Health Research, Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.
Dev Sci. 2018 Nov;21(6):e12687. doi: 10.1111/desc.12687. Epub 2018 Jul 3.
Infants have a strong tendency to look at faces. We examined individual variations in this attentional bias in 7-month-old infants by using a face-distractor competition paradigm and tested in a longitudinal sample whether these variations were associated with outcomes reflecting social behavior at 24 and 48 months of age (i.e., spontaneous helping, emotion understanding, mentalizing, and callous-unemotional traits; N = 100-138). The results showed a robust and distinct attention bias to faces at 7 months, particularly when faces were displaying a fearful expression. This bias declined between 7 and 24 months and there were no significant correlations in attention dwell times between 7 and 24 months of age. Variations in attention to faces at 7 months were not associated with emotion understanding or mentalizing abilities at 48 months of age, but increased attention to faces at 7 months (regardless of facial expression) was related to more frequent helping responses at 24 months and reduced callous-unemotional traits at 48 months of age. Thus, while the results fail to associate infants' face bias with later-emerging emotion understanding and mentalizing capacities, they are consistent with a model whereby increased attention to faces in infancy is linked with the development of affective empathy and responsivity to others' needs.
婴儿天生就有强烈注视人脸的倾向。我们通过使用面孔干扰竞争范式来研究 7 个月大婴儿的这种注意力偏向的个体差异，并在纵向样本中测试了这些变化是否与 24 个月和 48 个月时反映社会行为的结果相关（即自发帮助、情绪理解、心理化和无情特质；N=100-138）。结果表明，7 个月大的婴儿对面孔有强烈而明显的注意力偏向，尤其是当面孔表现出恐惧表情时。这种偏见在 7 个月至 24 个月之间逐渐减弱，7 个月至 24 个月之间的注意力停留时间没有显著相关性。7 个月时对面孔的注意力变化与 48 个月时的情绪理解或心理化能力无关，但 7 个月时（无论面部表情如何）对面孔的注意力增加与 24 个月时更频繁的帮助反应和 48 个月时更少的无情特质有关。因此，虽然研究结果未能将婴儿的面部偏好与后来出现的情绪理解和心理化能力联系起来，但它们与这样一种模型一致，即婴儿期对面孔的注意力增加与情感同理心和对他人需求的反应能力的发展有关。
