Enhanced attention to speaking faces versus other event types emerges gradually across infancy.

Abstract

The development of attention to dynamic faces vs. objects providing synchronous audiovisual vs. silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically assessed when, if, or how attention to speaking faces emerges and changes across infancy. Two measures of attention maintenance, habituation time (HT) and look-away rate (LAR), were derived from cross-sectional data of 2- to 8-month-old infants (N = 801). Results indicated that attention to audiovisual faces and voices was maintained across age, whereas attention to each of the other event types (audiovisual objects, silent dynamic faces, silent dynamic objects) declined across age. This reveals a gradually emerging advantage in attention maintenance (longer habituation times, lower look-away rates) for audiovisual speaking faces compared with the other three event types. At 2 months, infants showed no attentional advantage for faces (with greater attention to audiovisual than to visual events), at 3 months, they attended more to dynamic faces than objects (in the presence or absence of voices), and by 4 to 5 and 6 to 8 months significantly greater attention emerged to temporally coordinated faces and voices of people speaking compared with all other event types. Our results indicate that selective attention to coordinated faces and voices over other event types emerges gradually across infancy, likely as a function of experience with multimodal, redundant stimulation from person and object events.

The role of limited salience of speech in selective attention to faces in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders

“…Attention to orofacial gestures enhances speech processing in infants (Burnham & Dodd, 2004;Teinonen, Aslin, Alku, & Csibra, 2008) and in adults (Lansing & McConkie, 1999). This enhanced attention to dynamic gaze, facial and vocal cues emerges early in the first year of life (Bahrick, Todd, Castellanos, & Sorondo, 2016;Farroni, Mansfield, Lai, & Johnson, 2003;Senju & Csibra, 2008). The development of these multisensory processes is highly experience-dependent, as exemplified by perceptual narrowing and tuning to facial and speech patterns most prevalent in the child's native environment (Pascalis et al, 2014).…”

Assessing individual differences in the speed and accuracy of intersensory processing in young children: The intersensory processing efficiency protocol.

“…At the same time, the protocol is simple enough for infants and children to show reliable intersensory matching. Further, despite using a common protocol, participants of different ages will likely show selective attention to different properties of the events and use different processing strategies (see Bahrick, 2001; Bahrick, Todd, Castellanos, & Sorondo, 2016; Franchak, Heeger, Hasson, & Adolph, 2016; Frank, Vul, & Saxe, 2012). For older children and adults, the linguistic content of the social events may be more salient as their attention and language skills mature and affect speech perception and audiovisual processing (for related ideas see Bowerman & Levinson, 2001; Frank, Vul, & Saxe, 2012).…”

Temporal Dependency and the Structure of Early Looking

“…These 127 infants were part of a larger study in which mean performance for a variety of variables was reported, including total time to habituation, the look-away rate during habituation, the mean duration of the first two habituation trials, mean looking time over test trials, and visual recovery scores [2,31]. The durations of infants’ individual looks and the durations of total looking times within individual trials—the focus of the current study—have not been published.…”