Environmental Context Impacts Threat Detection in Children but not Adults

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

From early in human development, infants show a privileged attentional bias toward threatening visual images (Lobue & Deloache, 2010; Vaish et al., 2008). By 3 years of age, children, like adults, detect images such as angry facial expressions and snakes more quickly than non-threatening faces or animals (Hansen & Hansen, 1988; LoBue, 2009; LoBue et al., 2014; LoBue & DeLoache, 2008; Öhman et al., 2001). This privileged detection of threats has been argued to serve self-preservation and survival functions (Öhman et al., 2001), and hypothesized to emerge early in order to prepare us to readily detect and learn about threats in our environment right away (LoBue, 2013). However, it is currently unknown whether a bias to attend to a given threat—for instance, angry faces or snakes—might be specific to the larger environmental context in which it is encountered. Further, the environmental context might affect threat responding differently depending on age. For instance, spending childhood in an urban environment, but not currently living (as an adult) in an urban environment, is associated with reduced self-regulatory brain processes during social threat (Lederbogen et al., 2011), whereas spending childhood in a more natural (green) environmental context buffered the risk of psychiatric illness in adulthood (Engemann et al., 2019).

We tested the hypotheses that 1) young children’s threat bias would be sensitive to environmental context and 2) adults’ threat bias would not. In three experiments, we measured participant’s threat bias using a touch-screen threat detection task. Each participant completed the task twice: once while being repeatedly primed with urban landscape images and once while being repeatedly primed with natural landscape images. Our results show that 4- to 6-year-old children exhibited a social threat bias—faster detection of angry than happy faces—only when exposed to urban (grey) context images (Experiment 1; N = 59; see Figure 1) and an animal threat bias—faster detection of snake images than frog images—only when exposed to natural (green) context images (Experiment 2; N = 56; see Figure 1). In contrast, adults detected threatening images more quickly than non-threatening images independent of environmental context (Experiment 3; N = 181). These findings suggest that childhood represents a sensitive period during which threat detection systems are more susceptible to environmental context and point to a potential mechanism by which being embedded in an urban environment heightens vigilance to social threats, with implications for mental health and disease.

Authors

• Cat Thrasher, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Jenny Roe, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tobias Grossmann, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Non-Presenting Author