Poster #199 - Developmental Changes in Infants' Attention to Males and Females

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Adults’ expert processing of information from bodies is reflected in specialized scanning patterns (Hewig, Trippe, Hecht, Straube, & Miltner, 2008; Nummenmaa, Hietanen, Santtila, & Hyӧnӓ, 2012). Recently, White and colleagues (2018) found that, similarly to adults, 3.5- and 6.5-month-olds attend differently to the torsos of male and female stimuli. This finding demonstrates that not only are young infants sensitive to sex information, but that this sensitivity directs their attention in systematic ways. Theories of body knowledge development and intersensory redundancy vary in their predictions about the nature of the information that allows infants to exhibit such systematic scanning. In particular, they differ in their predictions about whether the face alone, the body alone, or a combination of both sources are necessary for specialized scanning. We addressed this issue in the current study.

Scanning patterns of 3.5-, 6.5-, and 9-month-olds (N = 80) in response to images that contained information relevant to sex classification in the face/head only or the body only were examined. Consistent with the previously cited studies of specialized scanning patterns in adulthood and infancy, it was hypothesized that, if infants reach the threshold of sensitivity to sex information necessary for specialized scanning patterns to emerge, they will display heightened attention to the torso region of the female stimulus compared to the torso region of the male stimulus. Half of infants were tested on images where relevant sex information was only present in the body and the face was non-informative/neutral, see Figure 1A, and the other half were tested on images where relevant sex information was only present in the face and the body was non-informative/neutral, see Figure 1B.

In both conditions, only 9-month-olds showed heightened attention to the female torso, see Figure 2. Thus, although sex-specific scanning of bodies emerges as early as 3.5 months of age (White et al., 2018), information from both faces and bodies is necessary until sometime between 6.5 and 9 months of age. These findings are consistent with the intersensory redundancy hypothesis which posits that because social categories typically manifest across multiple domains, their processing is facilitated when congruent information is present in more than one source (Bahrick, Lickliter, & Flom, 2004). Thus, younger infants exhibit systematic scanning when information from both faces and bodies is available but not when one source is non-informative. Furthermore, these results have implications for theories of body knowledge development. Specifically, evidence of integration between face and body knowledge is predicted by a general social cognition system that prepares infants to process social information across various sources (Bhatt et al., 2016; Simion et al., 2011). This is in contrast to theories that claim that body knowledge is slow to develop and independent of face knowledge development (Slaughter, Heron-Delaney, & Christie, 2012), thereby predicting that young infants’ sensitivity to sex information would be restricted to faces. Thus, the present results constrain theories of body knowledge development by demonstrating the complementary nature of facial and bodily information processing early in life.

Authors

• Hannah White, University of Kentucky
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Jubran, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ramesh Bhatt, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author