The development of biased attention to threat across the first two years of life

• In Event: Biopsychosocial processes in early development: Using large-scale longitudinal studies to uncover interacting developmental mechanisms

Abstract

Attention biases for threat—defined as rapid or prolonged looking at threatening stimuli—are generally regarded as normative and evolutionarily adaptive, functioning to help humans quickly respond to potentially threatening encounters. In support of this perspective, several studies have reported that adults detect threatening stimuli faster than benign control stimuli. In addition, by 6 to 8 months of age, infants look longer at threatening stimuli, show greater difficulty disengaging from threatening stimuli, and are faster to detect threatening stimuli when compared to positive or neutral stimuli. However, not all findings from this literature are consistent.

One potential explanation for these inconsistent findings could be that attention biases to threat and other emotionally-valenced stimuli develop and change over time. Moreover, while some attention biases are normative and early developing, others might diverge from these normative trajectories to become markers of risk for psychopathology at some point in development. However, to date, research on the development of attention biases for threat early in life is still quite limited. Further, the studies that do exist with infants use mostly cross-sectional designs, and thus we still know very little about the emergence of attention biases for threat and their developmental trajectory over time.

Here we describe normative patterns of affect-biased attention in a longitudinal sample of infants using two eye-tracking tasks that measure rapid detection of and engagement with emotional facial configurations. Infants completed each task at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age. In a vigilance task, we aimed to measure infants’ rapid detection of threat. Infants were shown a single stimulus—either a happy, angry, or neutral facial configuration—randomly presented in one of the four corners of a screen on each trial, and we measured how quickly infants first fixated, or detected, each target. In an overlap task, we aimed to measure engagement with threat. We presented infants with a happy, angry, or neutral facial configuration in the center of a screen, and shortly after their appearance, a checkerboard probe appeared simultaneously to the left or the right of the facial stimulus.

In the vigilance task, we found that between 4 and 24 months of age, infants became faster to detect angry relative to neutral facial configurations. Moreover, we found that significant differences in infants’ rapid detection of angry relative to neutral facial configurations were not present until 24 months of age. We found similar looking patterns over time in engagement, as indexed by an overlap task. Infants developed a stronger preference for looking at angry over neutral configurations relative to looking at the probe over time. Further, we found that infants displayed a significant bias for threat in engagement at 24-months, showing a greater preference for angry over neutral facial configurations in the presence of a probe. Taken together, this work suggests that infants display differential patterns of attention toward angry facial stimuli over the first two years of life, with a clear bias for threat emerging by 24 months of age across several components of attention.

Authors

• Vanessa LoBue, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Lori Beth Reider, Rutgers University - Newark

• Laura Ann Bierstedt, Rutgers University - Newark

• Jessica Burris, University of Rutgers - Newark

• Alicia Vallorani, University of Maryland - College Park

• Kelley E Gunther, Yale University

• Kristin A. Buss, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park