How Maternal Guidance of Attention Shapes Infants' Basic Visual Perception - A Cross-Cultural Neuroscience Approach

• In Event: Mechanisms underlying imitation, social learning, and social preferences

Abstract

Human visual perception differs profoundly between cultures. In Western cultures, the relative focus on the object versus the background of a visual scene is higher than in Eastern cultures (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001), a phenomenon coined context-sensitivity. Context-sensitivity was found to increase between 4-9 years across cultures with children from Eastern cultures showing significantly greater context-sensitivity than children from Western cultures (Imada et al., 2012). Köster & Kärtner (2018) found that inter-individual differences in context-sensitivity during early childhood were explained by parental verbal guidance of attention. In the present cross-cultural electroencephalogram (EEG) study, we assess whether maternal guidance of attention affects 11- to 13-month-old infants (N=84) context-sensitivity in a culture-specific way. To measure context-sensitivity nonverbally, Köster et al. (2017) established that visual cortical processing of object versus background could be assessed in the EEG of children by using a frequency tagging approach. This is, presenting object and background at different driving frequencies elicits separate evoked responses for each element. In the present study, mother-infant dyads from an urban context in Kyoto, Japan (N=37) and in Vienna, Austria (N=47) were shown visual scenes with an object in front of a background. Object and background were flickered at different driving frequencies (5.67 and 8.5 Hz, counterbalanced) while infants' visual cortical processing was measured with EEG. We applied a pre-post design with a training phase in between: in the pre- and post-phases, infants observed the scenes together with their mothers. During training, mothers were instructed to point out interesting elements of their choice to their infants. First, we assessed cultural differences between the two cultural contexts. We found that on a self-report questionnaire assessing socialization goals parents have for their infants in the first 3 years of life (adapted from Keller, 2007), Austrian mothers rated higher autonomous socialization goals over relational (hierarchical and prosocial) socialization goals compared to Japanese mothers (p<0.003, t=3.03). When comparing maternal attention styles between cultural contexts, we found that Austrian mothers guided their infants' attention more frequently to the object versus the background, compared to Japanese mothers (p<0.001, t=3.9). These results indicate that cultural differences in the guidance of attention emerge in early mother-infant interactions and add to previous evidence about cultural influence on the early development of context-sensitivity. Our preliminary EEG findings revealed amplitude increases in the tagging frequencies at occipital electrode sites during pre- and post-phases, indicating that frequency-tagging is a valid method to assess context-sensitivity in infancy. We will further assess if maternal attention guidance increases infants' visual cortical processing (evoked responses) to the element pointed out (object/background) during training. We will test if infants' visual processing changes from pre- to post-phase, by comparing respective evoked responses to object versus background. In this flash talk, we will present our findings regarding the main hypothesis that maternal guidance of attention shapes infants' early perceptual processing in visual cortical networks.

Authors

• Anna Bánki, University of Vienna
  Presenting Author

• Daiki Yamasaki, Kyoto University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shoji Itakura, Doshisha University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stefanie Hoehl, University of Vienna
  Non-Presenting Author

• Moritz Köster, Freie Universität Berlin
  Non-Presenting Author