Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Finland.
Neuroimage. 2021 Apr 1;229:117732. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117732. Epub 2021 Jan 20.
Electrophysiological studies on adults suggest that humans are efficient at detecting threat from facial information and tend to grant these signals a priority in access to attention, awareness, and action. The developmental origins of this bias are poorly understood, partly because few studies have examined the emergence of a generalized neural and behavioral response to distinct categories of threat in early childhood. We used event-related potential (ERP) and eye-tracking measures to examine children's early visual responses and overt attentional biases towards multiple exemplars of angry and fearful vs. other (e.g., happy and neutral) faces. A large group of children was assessed longitudinally in infancy (5, 7, or 12 months) and at 3 years of age. The final ERP dataset included 148 infants and 132 3-year-old children; and the final eye-tracking dataset included 272 infants and 334 3-year-olds. We demonstrate that 1) neural and behavioral responses to facial expressions converge on an enhanced response to fearful and angry faces at 3 years of age, with no differentiation between or bias towards one or the other of these expressions, and 2) a support vector machine learning model using data on the early-stage neural responses to threat reliably predicts the duration of overt attentional dwell time for threat-related faces at 3 years. However, we found little within-subject correlation between threat-bias attention in infancy and at 3 years of age. These results provide unique evidence for the early development of a rapid, unified response to two distinct categories of facial expressions with different physical characteristics, but shared threat-related meaning.
成人的电生理学研究表明，人类在从面部信息中检测威胁方面非常有效，并且倾向于优先让这些信号进入注意力、意识和行动。这种偏见的发展起源了解甚少，部分原因是很少有研究探讨在幼儿期对不同类别的威胁出现普遍的神经和行为反应。我们使用事件相关电位 (ERP) 和眼动追踪测量来检查儿童对愤怒和恐惧与其他（例如，快乐和中性）面孔的多个示例的早期视觉反应和明显的注意力偏向。一大群儿童在婴儿期（5、7 或 12 个月）和 3 岁时进行了纵向评估。最终的 ERP 数据集包括 148 名婴儿和 132 名 3 岁儿童；最终的眼动追踪数据集包括 272 名婴儿和 334 名 3 岁儿童。我们证明了 1）对面部表情的神经和行为反应在 3 岁时会集中在对恐惧和愤怒面孔的增强反应上，而对这些表情中的任何一种都没有区分或偏向，2）使用对威胁的早期神经反应数据的支持向量机学习模型可靠地预测了 3 岁时与威胁相关的面孔的明显注意力停留时间的持续时间。然而，我们发现婴儿期和 3 岁时的威胁偏向注意力之间的个体内相关性很小。这些结果为对具有不同物理特征但具有共同威胁相关意义的两种不同类别的面部表情的快速、统一反应的早期发展提供了独特的证据。
