Viktorsson Charlotte, Portugal Ana Maria, Taylor Mark J, Ronald Angelica, Falck-Ytter Terje
Development and Neurodiversity Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (KIND), Division of Neuropsychiatry, Department of Women's and Children's Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Infancy. 2024 May-Jun;29(3):459-478. doi: 10.1111/infa.12586. Epub 2024 Feb 15.
Efficiently processing information from faces in infancy is foundational for nonverbal communication. We studied individual differences in 5-month-old infants' (N = 517) sustained attention to faces and preference for emotional faces. We assessed the contribution of genetic and environmental influences to individual differences in these gaze behaviors, and the association between these traits and other concurrent and later phenotypes. We found an association between the mean duration of looking at a face (before looking away from it) at 5 months and socio-communicative abilities at 14 months (β = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.08; 0.26, p < 0.001). Sustained attention to faces predicted socio-communicative abilities over and above variance captured by mean fixation duration. We also found a statistically significant but weak tendency to prefer looking at smiling faces (relative to neutral faces), but no indication that variability in this behavior was explained by genetic effects. Moderate heritability was found for sustained attention to faces (A = 0.23, CI: 0.06; 0.38), while shared environmental influences were non-significant for both phenotypes. These findings suggest that sustained looking at individual faces before looking away is a developmentally significant 'social attention' phenotype in infancy, characterized by moderate heritability and a specific relation to later socio-communicative abilities.
婴儿期对面部信息的高效处理是非语言交流的基础。我们研究了5个月大婴儿（N = 517）对面部的持续注意力以及对表情面孔的偏好的个体差异。我们评估了遗传和环境影响对这些注视行为个体差异的贡献，以及这些特征与其他同时期和后期表型之间的关联。我们发现，5个月大时注视一张脸（在移开视线之前）的平均持续时间与14个月大时的社会交流能力之间存在关联（β = 0.17，95%置信区间：0.08；0.26，p < 0.001）。对面部的持续注意力预测了社会交流能力，超出了平均注视持续时间所捕捉到的方差。我们还发现，相对于中性面孔，婴儿有统计学上显著但较弱的倾向更喜欢注视笑脸，但没有迹象表明这种行为的变异性是由遗传效应解释的。对面部的持续注意力具有中等遗传力（A = 0.23，置信区间：0.06；0.38），而共享环境影响对这两种表型均无显著影响。这些发现表明，在移开视线之前持续注视个体面孔是婴儿期一种具有发育意义的“社会注意力”表型，其特征是具有中等遗传力以及与后期社会交流能力存在特定关系。
