Emotionally gaze-cued object processing in infants with fragile X syndrome

• In Event: 3-127 - Gaze Following in Infancy: Contextual Influences and Developmental Implications

Integrative Statement

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the leading known cause of inherited intellectual disability. The disorder is associated with pronounced levels of anxiety (Hagerman, 2002). Recent research investigated the developmental and cognitive foundations of that heightened anxiety. Burris et al. (2017) showed that young children with FXS exhibit a threat-specific attentional bias pattern on an affective dot probe, a pattern linked to heightened anxiety in typically developing populations.

To investigate the impact this threat bias has on subsequent processing in the presence of a threatening face, the current study investigated gaze following and gaze-cued object processing in the context of fearful emotion. Research using ERP has shown that differentially processing negative emotional facial expressions can impact gaze following and processing of gaze-cued objects (Hoehl et al., 2008). The current study utilized eye-tracking to investigate this process in infants with fragile X syndrome (FXS; M_age = 21.13 months, N=16), and a group of age-matched typically developing infants (TD; M_age = 19.13 months, N=17).

In the current task, a neutral or fearful face, with an object on each side, was presented on an eye tracker for one second. Next, during the cueing phase, the eyes on the face stimulus shifted gaze towards one object (target) for 5 seconds. Lastly, during the test phase, the objects were shown alone for 5 seconds. Both visual latency and total fixation duration to the target and distractor objects were measured.

During the cueing phase on fearful trials only, the TD group showed a faster visual latency to the target object, a metric of gaze following (t(16)=2.25, p=.03). The FXS participants showed no evidence of gaze following, via latency to the target, on either the neutral or fearful trials. During cueing, both groups looked longer to the neutrally gaze-cued target object than the fearfully gaze-cued target, showing an effectiveness of the neutral cue (F(1, 32)=7.50, p=.01). At test, both children with FXS (t(15)=2.96, p=.005) and typically developing children (t(16)=7.31, p< .001) visually prefer the target object on neutral but not fearful trials.

In summary, children with FXS did not show evidence of following the gaze from fearful faces as efficiently as the TD children, and both groups are failing to visually prefer the fearfully gaze-cued object at test. This could be due to a disruption in visual processing caused by the salient fearful face or could be attributed to the TD children having already visually processed that object during cueing. These findings highlight the impact that the attentional bias towards threat seen in infants with FXS can have on patterns of gaze following and object processing.

Authors

• Ryan Barry-Anwar, University of Florida
  Presenting Author

• Jessica L. Burris, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan M Rivera, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author