6- to 10-year-old children do not show race-based orienting biases to faces during an online attention capture task

Endogenous Control and Reward-Based Mechanisms Shape Infants’ Attention Biases to Caregiver Faces

“…However, because caregivers are both frequently experienced and rewarding (Sugden & Moulson, 2019;Minagawa-Kawai et al, 2009), additional work will be needed to fully understand the mechanisms underlying early attention biases to caregiver faces. Recent work showing that infants and children are not biased to orient to other categories of frequently experienced faces (i.e., own-race faces; Hunter & Markant 2021, 2023aPrunty et al 2020) suggests that familiarity alone may not be sufficient to drive attention biases to caregiver faces. However, the specific reward-based mechanisms that may contribute to infants' attention biases to caregiver faces remain unclear.…”

“…These experience-based effects have been observed during both classic visual paired comparison tasks (e.g., Kelly et al, 2007;Quinn et al, 2002;Sangrigoli et al, 2005) and when faces appeared with multiple competing items (e.g., Hunter & Markant, 2021;Prunty et al, 2020), suggesting that attention holding biases to highly familiar face categories may be robust across task contexts. However, recent studies did not observe race-based attention orienting biases either in infancy or childhood (Hunter & Markant, 2021, 2023aPrunty et al, 2020), suggesting that experience with specific face categories may differentially influence attention holding and orienting biases to faces.…”

“…Recent work demonstrating an orienting bias to caregivers in childhood controlled for both perceptual salience and endogenous mechanisms (Hunter & Markant, 2023b), suggesting that the observed orienting bias towards caregivers may instead reflect these other factors such as familiarity or reward value. However, infants and children did not show biased orienting to highly familiar own-race faces (Hunter & Markant, 2021, 2023aPrunty et al, 2020) and 6-month-old infants' attention holding biases to caregiver faces was independent of neurophysiological markers of face recognition (de Haan & Nelson, 1997), suggesting that it is unlikely that attention biases to caregiver faces are driven by familiarity alone. Infants show relatively consistent individual differences in emotional reactivity and regulation, including a measure of positive reactivity/affect and approach (i.e., "Surgency/Extraversion"; Shiner et al, 2012) that can index reward sensitivity (e.g., Vervoort et al, 2015;Wacker & Smillie, 2015).…”