Hunter Brianna K, Markant Julie
Department of Psychology, Tulane University.
Dev Psychol. 2023 Feb;59(2):344-352. doi: 10.1037/dev0001420. Epub 2022 Sep 1.
Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli, it is unclear whether specific types of faces capture attention to a greater extent than others. Caregiver faces are one of the most prevalent and socially motivating stimuli in infants' and children's environments, suggesting that they may be biased to orient to caregiver faces to a greater extent than faces in general. Forty-six 6- to 10-year-old children across the United States and Canada completed an online attention capture task in which participants searched for a target within arrays containing multiple distractors. During some trials, either a stranger or the child's caregiver's face appeared as one of the distractors. Children showed consistently poorer performance (i.e., increased omission errors, poorer accuracy, and slower response times) when the caregiver face appeared as a distractor, especially during trials in which the target was present and within larger search arrays. These increased performance costs indicate an enhanced orienting bias to caregiver faces, which may reflect increased motivational salience of these faces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
发展注意力技能能让孩子们通过关注特别突出或有意义的输入子集来解析他们复杂的世界。婴儿和儿童倾向于关注面孔，并且当面孔作为干扰物出现时，他们很难忽略。尽管过去的这些研究结果表明面孔比非社会刺激更突出，但尚不清楚特定类型的面孔是否比其他面孔更能吸引注意力。照顾者的面孔是婴儿和儿童环境中最常见且具有社会激励作用的刺激之一，这表明他们可能比一般面孔更倾向于关注照顾者的面孔。来自美国和加拿大的46名6至10岁儿童完成了一项在线注意力捕捉任务，参与者在包含多个干扰物的阵列中搜索目标。在一些试验中，陌生人或孩子照顾者的面孔作为干扰物之一出现。当照顾者的面孔作为干扰物出现时，孩子们的表现始终较差（即遗漏错误增加、准确率降低和反应时间变慢），尤其是在目标出现且搜索阵列较大的试验中。这些增加的表现成本表明对照顾者面孔的定向偏差增强，这可能反映了这些面孔的动机显著性增加。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2023美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
