Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, Marseille, France.
Sci Rep. 2020 Mar 12;10(1):4615. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-61188-8.
Faces are an important source of social signal throughout the lifespan. In adults, they have a prioritized access to the orienting system. Here we investigate when this effect emerges during development. We tested 139 children, early adolescents, adolescents and adults in a mixed pro- and anti-saccades task with faces, cars or noise patterns as visual targets. We observed an improvement in performance until about 15 years of age, replicating studies that used only meaningless stimuli as targets. Also, as previously reported, we observed that adults made more direction errors to faces than abstract patterns and cars. The children showed this effect too with regards to noise patterns but it was not specific since performance for cars and faces did not differ. The adolescents, in contrast, made more errors for faces than for cars but as many errors for noise patterns and faces. In all groups latencies for pro-saccades were faster towards faces. We discuss these findings with regards to the development of executive control in childhood and adolescence and the influence of social stimuli at different ages.
面部是贯穿整个生命周期的重要社交信号来源。在成年人中，面部信号优先激活注意系统。本研究旨在探索该效应在儿童发育过程中何时出现。我们使用面孔、汽车或噪声模式作为视觉目标，在混合正、反眼跳任务中测试了 139 名儿童、青少年和成年人。我们观察到表现随着年龄的增长而提高，这与仅使用无意义刺激作为目标的研究结果一致。此外，正如之前报道的那样，我们发现成年人做出的与面孔相关的错误方向要多于与抽象图案和汽车相关的错误方向。儿童在与噪声模式相关的情况下也表现出了这种效应，但这种效应不具有特异性，因为他们在汽车和面孔任务上的表现没有差异。相比之下，青少年做出的面孔相关错误比汽车相关错误多，但与噪声模式的错误数量相同。在所有组别中，正眼跳的潜伏期对面孔的反应更快。我们根据儿童和青少年执行控制的发展以及不同年龄段社会刺激的影响来讨论这些发现。
