Affect-biased attention is an important predictive factor of children's early socio-emotional development, possibly shaped by the family environment. Our study aimed to reveal children's temporal dynamic patterns of affect-biased attention by looking at time series of attention to emotional faces, individual differences in temporal dynamics, and…

Eye-tracking research on social attention in infants and toddlers has included heterogeneous stimuli and analysis techniques. This allows measurement of looking to inner facial features under diverse conditions but restricts across-study comparisons. Eye-mouth index (EMI) is a measure of relative preference for looking to the eyes or mouth,…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

The visual preferences of infants for adult versus infant faces were investigated. Caucasian 3.5- and 6-month-olds were presented with Caucasian adult vs. infant face pairs and Asian adult vs. infant face pairs, in both upright and inverted orientations. Both age groups showed a visual preference for upright adult over infant faces when the faces…

The current longitudinal study examined the association of temperamental inhibition (assessed by behavioral observation and parental reports) at three years old with reward and punishment bias (measured by a spatial cueing task) and mothers' and teachers' reports of internalizing behaviors and social competence at five years old in 153 Chinese…

Previous research indicates that monolingual infants have difficulty learning minimal pairs (i.e., words differing by one phoneme) produced by a speaker uncharacteristic of their language environment and that bilinguals might share this difficulty. To clearly reveal infants' underlying phonological representations, we minimized task demands by…

A head-mounted camera was used to measure head direction. The camera was mounted to the forehead of 20 6- and 20 12-month-old infants while they watched an object held at 11 horizontal (-80° to + 80°) and 9 vertical (-48° to + 50°) positions. The results showed that the head always moved less than required to be on target. Below 30° in the…

This longitudinal study examined the influence of stimulus material on attention and expectation learning in the visual expectation paradigm. Female faces were used as attention-attracting stimuli, and non-meaningful visual stimuli of comparable complexity (Greebles) were used as low attention-attracting stimuli. Expectation learning performance…

To examine the ontogeny of emotion-attention interactions, we investigated whether infants exhibit adult-like biases in automatic and voluntary attentional processes towards fearful facial expressions. Heart rate and saccadic eye movements were measured from 7-month-old infants (n = 42) while viewing non-face control stimuli, and neutral, happy,…