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Poster #1 - An eye Tracking Investigation of the Relation Between Parent and Infant Attentional Biases to Threat

Sat, March 23, 4:15 to 5:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Researchers have long hypothesized that attention biases for threatening stimuli play a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety in both adult and pediatric populations (Lester et al., 2009; Perez-Edgar et al., 2010). Although previous research has provided some evidence of a relation between parent and child cognitive biases toward threat, these studies use mixed methodologies to quantify threat bias in parents and children (Schneider et al., 2002; Creswell & O’Connor, 2006). Further, there are no studies to date examining the relation between parent and child attention biases for threat very early in development. The current study investigates the link between infant attention to threat and parental attention to threat using the same metrics, namely visual attention to threatening targets using eye tracking.

In the current study, parents brought their 4-month-old infants into the lab and both completed a battery of eye tracking tasks (N=16, data collection ongoing). An infant overlap task consisted of faces (neutral, angry, or happy) shown briefly in the center of the screen, immediately followed by the appearance of a peripheral checkerboard pattern on one side of the screen alongside the face. A threat bias score for the overlap task was calculated by subtracting total looking time to neutral faces from total looking time to angry faces, with a positive value indicating greater time fixating the angry face, and a negative number indicating greater time fixating a neutral face. During the same visit, the parent completed a classic visual search task where they were shown nine images (snakes and frogs or happy and angry faces) in a 3x3 matrix; either nine images from the same stimulus category, or eight images from the same category with a single discrepant image. Parents were prompted to indicate via button-press whether all nine images were from the same category, or whether there was a discrepant image in the matrix. Latency to visually fixate the discrepant image was measured.

The results thus far indicate a significant correlation between infant threat bias scores on the overlap task, and the parent visual search task. Interestingly, however, these correlations were only significant for trials on the parent visual search task where the discrepant targets were threatening—snakes (r=-.61, p=.01) and angry faces (r=-.51, p=.04). There were no significant relations between infant and adult attention when the discrepant targets were nonthreatening (frog or happy faces, p’s > 0.05). These results suggest that infants who have a larger bias to threat have parents who are demonstrating more rapid detection of discrepant threatening targets.

While these two tasks aim to tap into different attentional mechanisms, they both measure visual attention to threatening stimuli and present an exciting opportunity to investigate the attentional mechanisms that underlie the development of risk factors for anxiety.

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