Social Reward Uniquely Biases Children’s Attention Orienting to Faces

• In Event: Cueing and Capture: How Children Develop the Ability to Direct and Redirect Attention

Abstract

Individuals are biased to orient to faces beginning in infancy (Kwon et al., 2016), which is critical for efficient learning from social partners. Although research has established that experience with specific face types (e.g., own- vs. other-race, male vs. female, caregiver vs. stranger) can shape duration of looking to these faces, more limited work investigating whether more familiar face types differentially capture attention has yielded mixed results. Past work has shown that adults are biased to orient to socially rewarding faces (Anderson, 2016), whereas separate research demonstrated that infants under 12 months did not preferentially orient to more familiar own-race faces (Hunter & Markant, 2021; Prunty et al., 2020). However, it remains possible that additional experience to own-race faces in childhood may drive race-based orienting biases. Therefore, across two studies we expanded on these past findings by comparing children’s attention orienting biases to 1) motivationally salient caregiver faces and 2) frequently-experienced own-race faces.

Method. In Study 1, forty-four 6- to 10-year-old children completed an online attention capture task in which they searched for a target among multiple distractors. During some trials, the child’s caregiver face or a stranger face appeared as a distractor (Figure 1). We assessed attention capture by the faces based on the extent to which target detection was disrupted (i.e., increased errors, poorer accuracy, slower RT) when the face distractors were present. A separate group of thirty-nine 6- to 10-year-old children completed Study 2. The attention capture task was nearly identical except that own- or other-race faces appeared as distractors rather than the caregiver and stranger faces.

Results. Study 1 indicated that children’s attention capture varied based on face type. Specifically, the appearance of the caregiver’s face disrupted children’s target detection to a greater extent than a stranger’s face (e.g., increased errors, p’s < .04; Figure 2). In contrast, in Study 2 children showed similar target detection (error rate, accuracy, and RT) across trials in which own- and other-race faces appeared as a distractor (p’s > .39), suggesting that their orienting to faces did not vary depending on race-based information.

Discussion. Study 1 results indicating that caregiver faces captured children’s attention converge with past work demonstrating that motivational salience drives biased attention orienting in adulthood. Study 2 results are also consistent with past evidence that infants showed similar orienting to own- and other-race faces, suggesting that both infants’ and children’s orienting to faces may be unaffected by frequency of exposure to race-based information. Together, these studies suggest that the social reward and motivation associated with caregivers may drive biased attention orienting to a greater extent than frequency of exposure alone. These findings have critical implications for our understanding of attention development, as they suggest that social reward may uniquely shape children’s exploration of the environment.

Authors

• Brianna Hunter, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Julie Markant, Tulane University