Caregiver faces capture 6- to 10-year-old children’s attention during an online visual search task.

Abstract

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.

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

“…During some trials, either their own caregiver's face or a stranger's face appeared as one of the distractors. Children demonstrated poorer target detection performance when their caregiver's face appeared, suggesting that they were biased to orient to their caregiver's face even though it was irrelevant to the ongoing task (Hunter & Markant, 2023b). Together, these studies indicate that by 4 years of age children are biased to detect caregiver faces in complex arrays containing competing visual information.…”

“…Children detected their own caregiver's face within the array of competing faces faster than they detected a stranger face, indicating biased orienting to caregivers. Hunter and Markant (2023b) similarly found that 6-to 10-year-old children were more distracted by their caregiver's face during an attention capture task. Children searched for a target object within arrays that contained a varying number of distractors.…”

“…By 6 months of age, some studies report that infants maintain this preference for caregivers (e.g., Rigato et al, 2023) while others find increased preferential looking to stranger faces (e.g., Bartrip et al, 2001). Although infant research has focused on attention holding, recent work has also identified biased orienting to caregivers among older children (Fields et al, 2022;Hunter & Markant, 2023b). For example, Fields and colleagues (2022) asked 4-to 17-year old children to view arrays that contained either their caregiver's face among multiple images of a stranger's face or a stranger's face among multiple images of their caregiver's face.…”

“…Caregivers are a frequently experienced face identity (Sugden & Moulson, 2019) and also rewarding for infants and children (Abrams et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2019;Minagawa-Kawai et al, 2009), suggesting that attention biases to caregivers may not only reflect familiarity but also their social reward value. 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.…”

“…However, evidence for experiencebased orienting biases to faces has been more mixed. Although recent research found that older children were biased to orient to their caregiver's face (Fields et al, 2022;Hunter & Markant, 2023b), it is unknown whether infants are similarly biased to orient to caregivers. Furthermore, because attention holding and orienting biases are typically assessed using tasks with varying demands (i.e., visual paired comparison vs. multi-object arrays), the extent to which these early attention biases may develop in parallel remains unclear.…”