Brief face exposure leads to positive social preferences in 6- to 9-month-old infants

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Recent studies suggest the social consequences of the early face experience. For example, with the increased experience with own-race faces, infants gradually associated own-race faces with positive social signals. In contrast, they associated other-race faces with negative social signals. Though these findings demonstrated the experiential influence on infants’ social processing, the nature of this impact is less clear. Specifically, it is unclear whether perceptual experience alone (i.e., without social interaction) induces changes in infants’ social processing. To this end, the current study investigated how a brief perceptual experience of faces biases infants’ social representations of faces.

Twenty-seven infants (178-294 days, 13 females) participated in the study. Infants first watch a series of videos of a female actress performing various facial movements from 5 different visual angles (Figure 1). The facial movements include chewing, counting, head-turning, and blinking, where the actress remains neutral facial expression and does not exhibit social interactions. The videos last 3 to 7 seconds. By tracking infants’ fixation, we ensured that each infant watched the videos for 50 seconds. By watching these videos, infants obtained the perceptual experience of the actress. Then, we tested infants’ social representation of this familiar face with a cross-modal association task. In each test trial, infants first heard an emotional vocal sound for 3 seconds. After the emotional sound stopped, two faces showed up on each side of the screen. One of the faces was the familiar actress in frontal view, and the other face was a novel actress in frontal view. There were 16 test trials. Infants heard a happy vocal sound preceding half of the trials and an angry vocal sound in the other half. Across the test trials, the familiar face was always the same person, whereas the identity of the novel face changed in every trial.

Our measurement is the proportional looking time at the familiar face: Looking Time(familiar) / (Looking Time(familiar) + Looking Time(new)). If infants perceive the familiar face more positively, they will look longer at the familiar face when the happy sound was played as compared with that when the angry sound was played. Moreover, to track the progression of infants’ looking patterns across the test trials, we analyzed the looking time in the first 8 trials versus second 8 trials.

We found that the happy vocal sound led to a significantly longer looking at the familiar face than the angry sound (p = .026). Moreover, this pattern emerged in the second half of the test trials (Figure 2). No age difference was found.

These results indicate that brief perceptual exposure to a person can lead infants to associate this person with positive social signals, even without social interaction. This finding is consistent that the classic finding that familiarity to liking and corroborates recent advances in early cognitive development suggesting that early experiences lead to changes not only in perceptual, but also in social processing systems. Moreover, our findings suggest that such experience-based social consequences can be achieved within exposure as brief as one minute.

Authors

• Naiqi G Xiao, McMaster University
  Presenting Author

• Shaoying Liu, Zhejiang Sci-tech University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author