Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
PLoS One. 2024 Nov 12;19(11):e0311763. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311763. eCollection 2024.
Perception of infant faces plays a crucial role in adult-infant caretaking behaviour, with adults being found to demonstrate a reliable attraction towards infant faces over other stimuli. When affected by a congenital facial malformation such as cleft lip and/or palate, however, adults' visual scanning patterns and subjective appraisal of these faces have been found to be adversely affected. Little past work has explored how an observer's prior experience with this specific malformation might play a role in the perception of cleft-affected infant faces. To this end, two groups of adult female participants were recruited and presented with 48 images of infant faces (24 typical, 24 cleft-affected) with one group subjected to novel, purpose-built familiarisation training, where participants were exposed to infant cleft lip/palate related visual and informational stimuli prior to testing (n = 43). Eye gaze patterns and subjective "cuteness" ratings from this group were compared with an age matched control group which received no training (n = 41). No between group differences were found for "cuteness" ratings or eye gaze patterns to the cleft-affected mouth area in isolation, however, a significant negative relationship was found between gaze duration to the mouth region of cleft-affected images and subjective "cuteness" ratings, for control participants only. Notably, this relationship was not observed for the familiarised participants, suggesting their modified prior experience attenuated the effect that visual processing had on subjective appraisal of cleft-affected faces, when these two factors were assessed in tandem. Our findings suggest it is possible to attenuate the typically observed aversive behaviour towards cleft-affected infant faces. This may have implications for clinical practice concerned with supporting adult caretaking of malformation-affected infants and policies related to increasing positive perception of congenital facial disfigurement.
成人对婴儿面孔的感知在成人照顾婴儿的行为中起着至关重要的作用，研究发现，成人对婴儿面孔比对其他刺激物更具有可靠的吸引力。然而，当婴儿患有唇腭裂等先天性面部畸形时，成人的视觉扫描模式和对这些面孔的主观评价会受到负面影响。过去的研究很少探讨观察者之前对这种特定畸形的经验如何在感知受影响的婴儿面部时发挥作用。为此，我们招募了两组成年女性参与者，并向她们展示了 48 张婴儿面孔的图像（24 张正常，24 张受唇腭裂影响），其中一组接受了新的、专门设计的熟悉训练，在测试前，参与者接触了与婴儿唇腭裂相关的视觉和信息刺激（n = 43）。对这一组的眼动模式和主观“可爱”评分与没有接受过训练的年龄匹配对照组（n = 41）进行了比较。在对单独的受影响的嘴部区域的“可爱”评分或眼动模式进行比较时，两组之间没有差异，但对于控制参与者，注视受影响的嘴部区域的时间与主观“可爱”评分之间存在显著的负相关关系。值得注意的是，这种关系在熟悉的参与者中没有观察到，这表明他们的先前经验的改变减轻了视觉处理对受影响的唇腭裂面部的主观评估的影响，当这两个因素同时评估时。我们的研究结果表明，有可能减轻对受影响的唇腭裂婴儿面孔的典型厌恶行为。这可能对涉及支持受畸形影响的婴儿的成人照顾和与增加对先天性面部畸形的正面看法相关的政策具有影响。
