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Is there an innate gaze module? Evidence from human neonates
Abstract
Evidence from various fields that suggests humans have a specialized neural system dedicated to perceiving another’s eyes and detecting the direction in which they are gazing. The evidence is, however, inconclusive about whether this system is already operating in neonates. 105 neonates were presented with two photographs separately. One was a female adult face with the eyes open and the other was the same face with the eyes closed. Results indicated that the neonates spent significantly more time looking at the photograph with the eyes open than at the photograph with the eyes closed. This result may reflect that neonates have a special neural mechanism that detects eye-like stimuli in the environment and orients attention towards them. This new visual preference in infants warrants further research.
... Facial expressions are one of the first ways of communication between parents and infants prior to language development (Ekman, 1992). From the very beginning of life, infants are more attracted to face-like stimuli than other pattern stimuli (Reid et al., 2017;Simion & Giorgio, 2015;Valenza et al., (1996)), and they prefer faces that look directly at them and with open eyes compared to averted faces and faces with closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002). These findings evidence infants' early emerging sensitivity to others' social-communicative cues and their interest in social interactions. ...
... To identify a smile, the area around the eyes plays an important role, especially in displays of an authentic smile (i.e. a Duchenne smile) (Del Giudice & Colle, 2007;Ekman et al., 2002). Developmental literature indicates that human infants show a sensitivity to and preference for eyes from early on (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002;Grossmann, 2017). Moreover, infants' heightened attention to others' eyes in the first year of life was related to concurrent and later higher social competence such as recognition of and response to other's emotions (Pons et al., 2019;Wagner et al., 2013). ...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks became an effective hygienic measure to reduce infection rates. Given the relevance of facial expressions for social interactions, the question arises how face masks affect early social interactions. The current longitudinal study investigated how covering parts of the face might impact infants' responses to others' emotional expressions. Infants who were born during the pandemic were examined at three measurement points at the age of 6, 10 and 14 months. After displaying a neutral facial expression an experimenter smiled at infants while either wearing a mask (mask condition) or not wearing a mask (no mask condition). Infants' change in affect (i.e., negative, neutral, positive) from the neutral to the test phase (i.e., smiling experimenter) was evaluated. Results showed that at 6 and at 10 months infants' behavior did not differ between conditions, whereas at 14 months infants were more likely to show a change from neutral/negative affect to positive affect in the no mask condition than in the mask condition. Moreover, at 14 months infants were less likely to respond positively to the experimenter's smile (across conditions) than at 6 and at 10 months. These findings broaden our understanding of potential effects of mask wearing on the development of face processing and affective communication. Overall, they indicate a developmental trend according to which infants' processing and response to others' positive emotions becomes more selective and differentiated with increasing age.
... A child carried by a caregiver in the lateral position has good visual access to two highly salient objects -the caregiver's face and hand,both of which are highly relevant in the context of social learning. Infants have a preference for faces (Farroni et al., 2005) and eyes (Batki et al., 2000). Both are prioritised in attention soon after birth. ...
Infant carrying provides an important context for cognitive development and social learning in the first year of life. It enables children to perceive the world from a perspective similar to that of their parents. Lateral carrying provides children with new experiences because it gives them access to a broader range of objects. It also gives them better access to socially significant stimuli and aspects of the environment that are relevant to their parents. Thus, it can significantly contribute to learning about objects and their affordances as well as agents, their actions, and mental states. The paper argues that lateral carrying not only contributes to the development of skills related to the emergence of shared intentionality but may also play an important role in the development of the understanding of the we-mode and perhaps also in the formation of associations in the mirror neuron system. The final sections of the article offer suggestions for further research.
... Early in infancy orienting to social stimuli occurs and is generally understood to be necessary for later joint attention, which has been correlated with language development (e.g., Dawson et al., 1998;Dawson et al., 2004;Toth et al., 2006). Studies indicate that newborn babies recognize their mothers' voices (e.g., DeCasper & Fifer 1980) and show preference for looking at faces (e.g., Batki et al., 2000;Turati et al., 2002). This orientation to social stimuli seems to be disrupted in individuals with ASD. ...
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who are also minimally verbal may require specialized interventions to promote the development of vocalizations. Preliminary research supports an innovative procedure called response contingent stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) as a potentially effective procedure to promote vocalizations. The primary aim of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of delivering a randomized trial comparing response contingent SSP to a control condition. Secondary aims were to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying to the home environment the Digital Language Processor (DLP), a voice recorder by LENA®, and to examine preliminary efficacy of the intervention. Sixteen minimally verbal children with ASD (ages 2.0 to 3.9 years) were randomly assigned to the intervention or control condition with access to delayed treatment. Feasibility metrics were met in that 14 participants (88%) finished the study and attendance to all assessment time points and treatment sessions was over 90%. The research team conducted treatment sessions with 99% fidelity and collected 83.3% of voice recorder data. Nine of 16 caregiver satisfaction surveys were returned, and scores averaged 5.68 out of a possible 6.00 across all participants. Preliminary treatment data results showed that 8/14 participants (57%) showed significant improvement in target sounds and participants receiving the intervention were 3.5 times as likely to improve compared to control.
... Human infants are already as new-borns sensitive to others' gaze directions (Batki et al. 2000;Farroni et al. 2002) and spontaneously start co-orienting with gazes between 3 and 6 months (e.g., Butterworth and Jarrett 1991;Perra and Gattis 2010). The early ontogeny of gaze following in humans illustrates the fundamental character of this sociocognitive skill that subsequently has implications for the development of other cognitive capacities. ...
Gaze following refers to the ability to co-orient with others’ gaze directions. Ontogenetic studies on gaze following in animals have predominantly used human experimenters as demonstrators. It is, however, likely that developing animals are initially more attuned to individuals from their own species, which might result in differences in the ontogenetic onset of gaze following with human and conspecific demonstrators. “Checking back” is a signature behaviour in the gaze following repertoires of humans, apes, and some Old world monkeys. It is commonly interpreted as a representation of the referentiality of gaze and is thus diagnostic of social predictions. Recently, “checking back” has been discovered in four avian species, suggesting a shared skill among birds. To investigate effects of con- and allospecific demonstrators on gaze following responses, we studied visual co-orientations of four hand-raised juvenile common ravens (Corvus corax) with human and conspecific gaze cues. Moreover, we for the first time investigated “checking back” in ravens and compared the effects of con- and allospecific demonstrators on this behaviour. Ravens followed human and conspecific gaze with no apparent differences in ontogenetic onset, but after significantly longer latencies with human demonstrators. Subjects moreover already checked back at 30 days old and did so significantly more often with conspecific demonstrators. Our findings suggest differences in processing speed and social predictions of human and conspecific gazes, indicating an underlying neurocognitive mechanism attuned to social information gathering from conspecifics. We propose more studies using conspecific demonstrators to reveal the full gaze following potential of a species.
... Gaze following is a fast and quasi reflex-like behaviour that emerges very early during ontogeny (Batki et al., 2000;Del Bianco et al., 2019;Driver et al., 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Hood et al., 1998;Langton et al., 2000;Szufnarowska et al., 2014), hence meeting Fodor's criteria of a domain specific, probably largely innate capacity (Fodor, 1983). Although gaze following is an automatic behaviour in some contexts, triggering a reflexive saccade in the observer (Feng & Zhang, 2014), observers are able to control it if alternative behaviours might be more pertinent in a given moment. ...
Gaze following is a major element of non-verbal communication and important for successful social interactions. Human gaze following is a fast and almost reflex-like behavior, yet, it can be volitionally controlled and suppressed to some extent if inappropriate or unnecessary, given the social context. In order to identify the neural basis of the cognitive control of gaze following, we carried out an event-related fMRI experiment, in which human subjects' eye movements were tracked while they were exposed to gaze cues in two distinct contexts: a baseline gaze following condition in which subjects were instructed to use gaze cues to shift their attention to a gazed-at spatial target and a control condition in which the subjects were required to ignore the gaze cue and instead to shift their attention to a distinct spatial target to be selected based on a color mapping rule, requiring the suppression of gaze following. We could identify a suppression-related BOLD response in a frontoparietal network comprising dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the anterior insula, precuneus and posterior parietal cortex (PPC). These findings suggest that over excitation of frontoparietal circuits in turn suppressing the gaze following patch might be a potential cause of gaze following deficits in clinical populations.
... Children have no prenatal experience of perceiving faces, but they show a preference for faces from birth (e.g., Valenza, Simion, Cassia, & Umilta, 1996). Even more, newborns prefer faces that look directly at them to faces that avert their gaze (Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004), and they prefer faces with eyes open to faces with eyes closed (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000). This face preference suggests that children distinguish from birth between a social agent and a non-social physical object and respond to whether the face-bearing social agent wants to interact with them and whether to expect something interesting to learn from this person. ...
... Eye contact is one of the most powerful methods of communication between humans and this starts within days. Babies prefer faces with eyes open(582) and prefer faces that engage with them in mutual directed gaze rather than an averted gaze(583). New-borns learn to imitate the gestures of other, even engaging in 'contagious' crying within just a few days of birth(581,584). ...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition typically
diagnosed at 2-4 years of age when deficits in social interaction and communication are noted
by carers. Our knowledge of ASD is advancing with greater awareness of the needs of autistic
children and adults and a move towards improving services for these patients. The underlying
neurobiology of ASD is a unifying aetiological agent, likely altered through both genetic and
environmental influences. There is compelling evidence to suggest that abnormalities in
Excitatory (E) glutamate and inhibitory (I) Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) signalling in the brain may underpin ‘atypical’ development. Therefore I chose to examine relationships within the glutamatergic system in the striatum.
First I looked at metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) in adults with and without ASD and found higher levels of mGluR5 among autistic participants. This is consistent with other recent studies. Despite the close functional ties between mGluR5 and E/I signalling, no-one had directly examined the relationship between mGluR5 and glutamate or GABA in vivo in the human brain of autistic individuals. I found a strong negative relationship between GABA+ and mGluR5. I then looked at mGluR5 in three animal models associated with ASD to see whether
any of these models might explain the greater availability of mGluR5 in autism. CNTNAP2 KO mice had significantly higher mGlu5 receptor binding in the striatum (caudate-putamen) as compared to wild-type (WT) mice. Given that CNTNAP2 is associated with a specific striatal deficit of parvalbumin positive GABA interneurons and ‘autistic’ features, this finding suggests that an increase in mGluR5 in ASD may relate to developmental GABAergic interneuron abnormalities.
Neurodevelopment requires careful coordination of neuronal and glial processes spanning proliferation, differentiation, myelination and pruning. Disruption to this process can result in neurodevelopmental difficulties and disorders such as ASD. Therefore I conducted early life studies examining the relationship between subcortical Glx (Glutamate and Glutamine), N-acetylaspartate (a marker of neuronal health) and myo-Inositol (a marker of glial activity) at three early life time points: in utero, within 4 weeks of birth (neonatal time point) and at 4-6-months of age (‘infant’ time point). I compared these to later neurodevelopmental outcomes
finding that higher neonatal NAA concentrations corresponded to better general
neurodevelopmental scores and lower ADOS-2 scores. As NAA is a marker of neuronal health this implies that we can mark neuronal health at birth and demonstrate that this correlates with neurodevelopmental outcomes. I then went on to examine these same relationships at the 4-6-month timepoint. Higher levels of myo-Inositol (and therefore greater glial activity) corresponded to poorer general and social developmental outcomes. Higher levels of Glx and therefore excess excitation predicted greater social deficits. This is in keeping with the theory of
E/I imbalance.
... Studies investigating the subtleties of infants' attention to faces have suggested that infants' attention to the eyes and the mouth shifts across development. At birth, eyes determine newborns' preferential orientation toward faces (Acerra et al., 2002;Batki et al., 2000). Infants show great sensitivity to eyes and gaze direction, essential cues in conveying social information and establishing a communicative connection with another individual. ...
To prevent the spread of COVID‐19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess how face masks modulate infants' attention to faces over the course of the first year of life. We measured 3, 6, 9, and 12‐month‐olds’ looking behavior using a paired visual preference paradigm under two experimental conditions. First, we tested infants' preference for upright masked or unmasked faces of the same female individual. We found that regardless of age, infants looked equally long at the masked and unmasked faces. Second, we compared infants' attention to an upright masked versus an inverted masked face. Three‐ and 6‐month‐olds looked equally long to the masked faces when they were upright or inverted. However, 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants showed a novelty preference for the inverted masked face. Our findings suggest that more experience with faces, including masked faces, leads to efficient adaptations of infants' visual system for processing impoverished social stimuli, such as partially occluded faces.
... Attending to another individual's focus of attention has shown to be of great importance for the development of social communication. From a very early age, infants manifest a special sensitivity to other people's faces, first by showing preferential interest for the eyes (see Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002;Maurer, 1985), and soon later by actually following their interlocutor's gaze (i.e., D'Entremont et al., 1997;Gredebäck et al., 2010;Hains and Muir, 1996;Hood et al., 1998). From an evolutionary point of view, the importance of eye-gaze detection has led (across evolutionary pressure) humans to sacrifice camouflage for communication, developing a higher eye contrast morphology with respect to non-human primate eyes (Kobayashi and Kohshima, 1997). ...
Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses “social-specific” processes exclusively involved in attention to eye-gaze or the operation of domain-general attentional processes. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis indicating that eye-gaze and non-social directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce equivalent attentional effects. This result casts doubt on the potential utility of the classic cueing task in revealing social-specific processes. On the other hand, we review behavioral evidence suggesting that eye-gaze stimuli may induce higher-order social processes when more specific experimental procedures that analyze qualitative rather than quantitative differences are used. These findings point to an integrated view in which domain-general and social specific processes both contribute to the attentional mechanisms induced by eye-gaze direction. Finally, some proposals about the social components specifically triggered by eye-gaze stimuli are discussed.
... It was later shown that already newborns are sensitive to others' gazes (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002) and have a preference for direct gaze (Farroni et al., 2002). Gaze cueing, where observers orient towards an object in the direction of another's gaze, also appears to be present in newborns (Farroni et al., 2004). ...
Social gaze has received much attention in social cognition research in both human and non-human animals. Gaze following appears to be a central skill for acquiring social information, such as the location of food and predators, but can also draw attention to important social interactions, which in turn promotes the evolution of more complex socio-cognitive processes such as theory of mind and social learning. In the past decades, a large number of studies has been conducted in this field introducing differing methodologies. Thereby, various factors influencing the results of gaze following experiments have been identified. This review provides an overview of the advances in the study of gaze following, but also highlights some limitations within the research area. The majority of gaze following studies on animals have focused on primates and canids, which limits evolutionary interpretations to only a few and closely related evolutionary lineages. This review incorporates new insights gained from previously understudied taxa, such as fishes, reptiles, and birds, but it will also provide a brief outline of mammal studies. We propose that the foundations of gaze following emerged early in evolutionary history. Basic, reflexive co-orienting responses might have already evolved in fishes, which would explain the ubiquity of gaze following seen in the amniotes. More complex skills, such as geometrical gaze following and the ability to form social predictions based on gaze, seem to have evolved separately at least two times and appear to be correlated with growing complexity in brain anatomy such as increased numbers of brain neurons. However, more studies on different taxa in key phylogenetic positions are needed to better understand the evolutionary history of this fundamental socio-cognitive skill.
... Infants' social learning is supported by several early emerging behavioral patterns, such as a sensitivity and responsivity to social and communicative cues, social contingency, and behavioral mimicking, all of which lay the foundation for social learning mechanisms to develop. Sensitivity to social stimuli, such as faces (Guellai and Streri, 2011), gaze direction (Batki et al., 2000) and biological motion (Simion et al., 2011) emerges within the first year. Newborns, for instance, not only show a preference for face-like stimuli (Rosa Salva et al., 2011;Simion et al., 2011), but also exhibit greater recognition, as indexed through longer gaze time, for faces that have previously spoken to them with direct eye gaze compared to averted faces (Guellai and Streri, 2011). ...
The foundations of learning are laid in infancy. Using examples from pioneer and recent studies, we describe three mechanisms essential to infants' knowledge acquisition: associative, statistical, and social learning. We argue that a comprehensive understanding of infants' learning is limited by the traditional focus on mechanisms in isolation. We showcase two integrative approaches that begin to clarify how distinct mechanisms work together to provide a comprehensive, parsimonious, description of infants' learning. We raise considerations for moving toward a complete, culturally nuanced, modern understanding of how infants across the globe acquire the knowledge foundations for optimal development.
... In the same way, newborns look longer at upright biological motion displays which could bootstrap processing of social cues (Bardi et al., 2011;Simion et al., 2002Simion et al., , 2008. Previous works hypothesized these results reflect the presence of innate modules or inborn hardwired neural systems as part of an evolutionarily ancient system selected to pay attention to such pattern (Bardi et al., 2011;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000;Simion et al., 2008). In addition to these wirings, we hypothesize that evolution could have also selected for a specific amount of cognitive resources available from birth that would match the complexity of the most relevant patterns found in a newborn's environment, making them closer to the infant's optimal level of stimulation. ...
Phenomena such as engagement, attention and curiosity rely heavily on the “optimal-level of stimulation (or arousal)” model, which suggests they are driven by stimuli being neither too simple nor too complex. Two points often overlooked in psychology are that each stimulus is simultaneously processed with its context, and that a stimulus complexity is relative to an individual’s cognitive resources to process it. According to the “optimal-level of stimulation” model, while familiar contexts may decrease the overall stimulation and favour exploration of novelty, a novel context may increase the overall stimulation and favour preference for familiarity. In order to stay closer to their optimum when stimulation is getting too high or too low, individuals can explore other stimuli, adopt a different processing style or be creative. The need and the ability to adopt such strategies will depend upon the cognitive resources available, which can be affected by contextual stimulation and by other factors such as age, mood or arousability. Drawing on empirical research in cognitive and developmental psychology, we provide here an updated “optimal-level of stimulation” model, which is holistic and coherent with previous literature. Once taken into account the role of contextual stimulation as well as the diverse factors influencing internal cognitive resources, such model fits with and enriches other existing theories related to exploratory behaviors. By doing so, it provides a useful framework to investigate proximate explanations underlying learning and cognitive development, and to develop future interventions related, for example, to eating, and learning disorders.
... En effet, dès 2 mois, les nourrissons préfèrent regarder les yeux que les autres régions du visage (Hainline, 1978 ;Haith et al., 1977). D'autres travaux ont montré que les nouveau-nés préfèrent un visage dans lequel les yeux sont dirigés vers le bébé plutôt que détournés du bébé (Farroni et al., 2002) et un visage dans lequel les yeux sont ouverts plutôt que fermés (Batki et al., 2000). En grandissant, cette préférence semble de plus spécifique aux yeux humains, puisque des visages de singes présentés avec des yeux d'humains plutôt que les leurs sont préférés par les nourrissons dès 3 mois (Dupierrix et al., 2014). ...
Dès la naissance, les nourrissons sont exposés à des visages qui parlent. Afin de pouvoir correctement interagir avec leurs congénères, les nouveau-nés vont devoir apprendre à traiter l’information provenant de ceux-ci. Le traitement des visages et le traitement du langage se développent ainsi rapidement durant la première année de vie des nourrissons. Cependant, que ce soit pour les visages ou pour le langage, beaucoup de nourrissons ont un biais d’exposition : ils sont presque exclusivement exposés aux visages de leur type et à leur langue maternelle. Une conséquence de ce biais d’exposition est que les nourrissons vont développer des capacités de discrimination plus fines pour traiter les stimuli natifs que les stimuli non-natifs. Dans la littérature scientifique, ce phénomène appelé rétrécissement perceptif à été mis en évidence de nombreuses fois dans le cadre du développement du langage et dans le cadre du développement du traitement des visages. La trajectoire développementale commune de ces deux systèmes cognitifs durant la première année de vie suggère des interactions entre ces deux systèmes. Cependant, ces interactions sont encore peu étudiées.Le but de la thèse présentée ici était d’étudier les interactions entre les traitements du langage et des visages durant la première année de vie.Dans une première étude, nous avons voulu étudier l’impact du type de visage sur une tâche de correspondance phonémique, sur des nourrissons de 3 et 9 mois. Les nourrissons de 3 mois ne semblent pas faire correspondre une voyelle avec la vidéo d’une locutrice si celle-ci n’est pas d’un type familier. Les résultats de cette étude nous indiquent que dès 3 mois, les nourrissons traitent différemment le signal audio-visuel selon le type du visage qui le produit. Dans une deuxième étude, nous avons voulu évaluer l’impact du type de visage sur la perception de l’effet McGurk, sur des nourrissons de 6, 9 et 12 mois. De plus, nous avons souhaité voir la robustesse de cet effet en l’étudiant de manière interculturelle (en France et au Japon). Nous montrons que la sensibilité à cette illusion audio-visuelle semble dépendante du type de visage. De plus, mis en commun avec nos collègues japonais, nos résultats montrent que la sensibilité à l’effet McGurk peut être conditionné par la culture dans laquelle grandissent les nourrissons. Dans une troisième étude, nous nous sommes intéressés à l’impact des associations entre types de visages et types de langues sur l’attention visuelle des nourrissons de 6, 9 et 12 mois. Cette étude montre qu’à 3 mois, certaines associations de langues et de visages semblent attendus par les nourrissons et plus regardées. Ces associations sont considérées comme congruentes puisqu’elles ne vont pas à l’encontre de ce que les nourrissons rencontrent habituellement dans leur environnement. Dans une quatrième étude, nous avons testé l’impact de ces associations sur la reconnaissance d’individus par des nourrissons de 9 et 12 mois. Nous montrons que les associations congruentes aident la reconnaissance des individus, tandis que les associations incongruentes perturbent la reconnaissance des individus.Ces études renforcent l’idée que d’étroites interactions lient le traitement du langage et le traitement des visages durant la petite enfance. De plus, nous montrons de nouveaux marqueurs du rétrécissement perceptif avant 9 mois. Nous montrons aussi un nouveau moyen expérimental permettant de moduler l’impact du rétrécissement perceptif. Ces travaux de thèse permettent d’élargir nos connaissances concernant le rétrécissement perceptif et ainsi d’en affiner la définition.
... Humans are born with a preference of looking at the eyes. Newborns spend a significantly longer time looking at a face with opened eyes than the same face with closed eyes [1]. The preference to look at faces with opened eyes continues to be higher than the preference to look at faces with closed eyes as the child matures [2]. ...
Our eyes convey information about a person. The pupils may provide information regarding our emotional states when presented along with different emotional expressions. We examined the effects of pupil size and vergence on inferring other people’s characteristics in neutral expression eyes. Pupil sizes were manipulated by overlaying black disks onto the pupils of the original eye images. The disk area was then changed to create small, medium, and large pupils. Vergence was simulated by shifting the medium-sized disks nasally in one eye. Pupil sizes were exaggerated for Experiment 1 and followed values from the literature for Experiment 2. The first Purkinje image from the eye photos in Experiment 2 was kept to preserve image realism. The characteristics measured were sex, age, attractiveness, trustworthiness, intelligence, valence, and arousal. Participants completed one of two online experiments and rated eight eye pictures with differently sized pupils and with vergence eyes. Both experiments were identical except for the stimuli designs. Results from Experiment 1 revealed rating differences between pupil sizes for all characteristics except sex, age, and arousal. Specifically, eyes with extremely small pupil sizes and artificial vergence received the lowest ratings compared to medium and large pupil sizes. Results from Experiment 2 only indicated weak effects of pupil size and vergence, particularly for intelligence ratings. We conclude that the pupils can influence how characteristics of another person are perceived and may be regarded as important social signals in subconscious social interaction processes. However, the effects may be rather small for neutral expressions.
... Shortly after birth (if not even before, see Reid et al., 2017), infants show a preference for face-like stimuli over non-face-like stimulus configurations (Valenza et al., 1996), which might be explained by certain characteristics of face-like configurations (Cassia et al., 2004;Morton & Johnson, 1991;Turati et al., 2002). From early on, infants are sensitive to faces that seem ready for communication: For example, newborns look longer to faces that look directly at them than to faces that look away (Farroni et al., 2002) and they prefer faces with open eyes compared to closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000). Further, infants are faster to detect peripheral stimuli that appear in the direction of an artificial gaze shift (a phenomenon termed gaze cueing), which might hint at a rudimentary sensitiv-sufficient to provide infants with the social input they need to develop social and emotional competencies such as gaze following. ...
The COVID‐19 pandemic has been influencing people's social life substantially. Everybody, including infants and children needed to adapt to changes in social interactions (e.g., social distancing) and to seeing other people wearing facial masks. In this study, we investigated whether these pandemic‐related changes influenced 12‐ to 15‐months‐old infants' reactions to observed gaze shifts (i.e., their gaze following). In two eye‐tracking tasks, we measured infants' gaze‐following behavior during the pandemic (with‐COVID‐19‐experience sample) and compared it to data of infants tested before the pandemic (no‐COVID‐19‐experience sample). Overall, the results indicated no significant differences between the two samples. However, in one sub‐task infants in the with‐COVID‐19‐experience sample looked longer at the eyes of a model compared to the no‐COVID‐19‐experience sample. Within the with‐COVID‐19‐experience sample, the amount of mask exposure and the number of contacts without mask were not related to infants' gaze‐following behavior. We speculate that even though infants encounter fewer different people during the pandemic and are increasingly exposed to people wearing facial masks, they still also see non‐covered faces. These contacts might be sufficient to provide infants with the social input they need to develop social and emotional competencies such as gaze following.
... Our gaze, a key protagonist of social interactions, allows us to acquire information from the environment and simultaneously signal back toward it (Jarick & Kingstone, 2015). Regarding this second property, the gaze can be considered a stimulus in itself, with a unique morphology that we are prepared to recognize from an early age (Batki et al., 2000). The human sclera (white area surrounding the darker iris) is significantly more exposed compared with other species', reflecting how our gaze has evolved sacrificing adaptation to camouflage from predators to gain increased gaze signal (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997). ...
Subtle to no attentional differences have been broadly observed when using gaze and arrows as orienting cues. However, recent studies have found opposite effects when they are used as targets in spatial interference tasks, with arrows eliciting faster responses when their position is congruent with the indicated direction and gaze producing faster responses in incongruent conditions. In two preregistered experiments aimed at exploring the mechanisms supporting these findings, we examined whether the congruency sequence effects (CSE) elicited by gaze and arrows generalized from one stimulus to another, using an intrablock design where the type of stimuli was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis. Typical CSE were observed for arrows, with a decrease of congruency effects after incongruent trials, and reversed CSE for gaze, with an increased inversion of congruency effects after incongruent trials. Both patterns occurred independently of the preceding type of target, showing that congruency effects can decrease after positive outcomes (e.g., arrow trials following an incongruent gaze trial), and generalized across different nonsocial and social stimuli as shown in a third experiment. These results are consistent with the coexistence of a shared spatial interference component between gaze and arrow trials, potentially responsible for the CSE obtained in switching target trials, and an additional social dimension, exclusively engaged in gaze trials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... He suggested that Fodorian modules, such as an eye direction detector, process specific categories of sensory input. Support of this notion is found in research indicating that newborns prefer looking at faces with open eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000) and at faces displaying direct over averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002;Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004). Other theories are more process-oriented. ...
Though much is known about the emergence and development of gaze following in infancy, there are large disagreements in some critical areas and major uncertainties within others. In this work, we highlight some of these areas in terms of five big questions that we believe are essential to address in order to advance research in the field. (1) How does social environment and culture impact gaze following? (2) What mechanisms drive the emergence of gaze following? (3) Does gaze following facilitate language development? (4) Is diminished gaze following an early marker of Autism? (5) How does gaze following relate to perspective-taking? This chapter aims not to answer these questions but to stimulate a discussion about the fundamental principles and assumptions on which the field resides and potentially serve as a guide for future research programs.
... Attending to another individual's focus of attention has shown to be of great importance for the development of social communication. From a very early age, infants manifest a special sensitivity to other people's faces, first by showing preferential interest for the eyes (see Maurer, 1985;Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002), and soon later by actually following their interlocutor's gaze (i.e., Hains & Muir, 1996;Hood et al., 1998;D'Entremont et al., 1997;Gredebäck et al., 2010). From an evolutionary point of view, the benefits of making gaze and gaze direction easily identifiable must be so important as to have led (across evolutionary pressure) the human sclera to produce a significantly higher contrast with the darker central iris, even if that implies sacrificing camouflage and therefore increasing the cost of exposition to predators (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997). ...
Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses an attribute of social cognition in this stimulus. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis showing that nonsocial directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce an effect identical to that of eye gaze, indicating that orienting triggered by this social cue may be reflecting a domain-general orienting rather than a specialized mechanism of social cognition. Nonetheless, biologically relevant stimuli may induce additional higher-order processes of a social nature, which might only be observed with more specific experimental procedures that analyse qualitative rather than quantitative differences. Data from those paradigms support the existence of common and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze. Finally, we offer some conclusions about the nature of extra-social cognition processes specifically triggered by eye gaze.
... One possible explanation of the inversion effects observed is that domain-specific mechanisms for gaze following are tuned to upright faces and bodies, and are no-longer engaged-or engaged less-by inverted exemplars. According to one domainspecific account, humans possess innate neurocognitive mechanisms for gaze following [10][11][12] . It is likely that following the gaze of others helps to scaffold the development of more complex mentalizing skills (e.g., visual perspective taking, understanding of others' beliefs and desires), thought to aid social learning, interaction and collaboration 13 . ...
It is well-established that faces and bodies cue observers’ visuospatial attention; for example, target items are found faster when their location is cued by the directionality of a task-irrelevant face or body. Previous results suggest that these cueing effects are greatly reduced when the orientation of the task-irrelevant stimulus is inverted. It remains unclear, however, whether sensitivity to orientation is a unique hallmark of “social” attention cueing or a more general phenomenon. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the cueing effects produced by common objects (power drills, desk lamps, desk fans, cameras, bicycles, and cars) are also attenuated by inversion. When cueing stimuli were shown upright, all six object classes produced highly significant cueing effects. When shown upside-down, however, the results were mixed. Some of the cueing effects (e.g., those induced by bicycles and cameras) behaved liked faces and bodies: they were greatly reduced by orientation inversion. However, other cueing effects (e.g., those induced by cars and power drills) were insensitive to orientation: upright and inverted exemplars produced significant cueing effects of comparable strength. We speculate that (i) cueing effects depend on the rapid identification of stimulus directionality, and (ii) some cueing effects are sensitive to orientation because upright exemplars of those categories afford faster processing of directionality, than inverted exemplars. Contrary to the view that attenuation-by-inversion is a unique hallmark of social attention, our findings indicate that some non-social cueing effects also exhibit sensitivity to orientation.
... It is indeed known that eye gaze has a crucial role in detecting the focus of attention of other individuals and in inferring their goals [27][28][29]. From a developmental point of view, the attraction of the eye area appears spontaneously in two month-old children, and its absence is associated with severe pathologies [30]. For instance, individuals who show difficulties looking into the eyes of others might have clinical conditions such as schizophrenia [31], autism [32] or focal brain damage [33]. ...
Humans beings decide to trust others selectively, often based on the appearance of a face. But how do observers deal with the wide variety of facial morphologies and, in particular, those outside their own familiar cultural group? Using reverse correlation, a data-driven approach to explore how individuals create internal representations without external biases, we studied the generation of trustworthy faces by French and Chinese participants (N = 160) within and outside their own cultural group. Participants selected the most trustworthy or attractive (control condition) face from two identical European or Asian descent faces that had been modified by different noise masks. A conjunction analysis to reveal facial features common to both cultures showed that Chinese and French participants unconsciously increased the contrast of the "pupil-iris area" to make the face appear more trustworthy. No significant effects common to both groups were found for the attraction condition suggesting that attraction judgements are dependent on cultural processes. These results suggest the presence of universal cross-cultural mechanisms for the construction of implicit first impressions of trust, and highlight the importance of the eyes area in this process.
... Reduced eye gaze as a potential endophenotype to clinical ASD has received great interest over many decades (Itier & Batty, 2009;Klin et al., 2020;Phillips et al., 1992;Schultz, 2005;Tiede & Walton, 2020). Human babies have an innate preference for faces (Goren et al., 1975;Valenza et al., 1996) and the eye region in particular draws their attention (Batki et al., 2000). Relative to typically developing children, however, infants later diagnosed with ASD look less at faces and show reduced eye contact and gaze-following behaviour (Leekam et al., 1998;Merin et al., 2007;Riby et al., 2009). ...
Reduced eye contact early in life may play a role in the developmental pathways that culminate in a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. However, there are contradictory theories regarding the neural mechanisms involved. According to the amygdala theory of autism, reduced eye contact results from a hypoactive amygdala that fails to flag eyes as salient. However, the eye avoidance hypothesis proposes the opposite—that amygdala hyperactivity causes eye avoidance. This review evaluated studies that measured the relationship between eye gaze and activity in the ‘social brain’ when viewing facial stimuli. Of the reviewed studies, eight of eleven supported the eye avoidance hypothesis. These results suggest eye avoidance may be used to reduce amygdala-related hyperarousal among people on the autism spectrum.
... L'attention conjointe est une compétence Dans nos communications quotidiennes, l'engagement entre partenaires sociaux se fait par un regard dirigé vers le regard de l'interlocuteur. De même, les bébés ont une préférence pour des visages présentés de face, une préférence pour les regards directs (les yeux regardent en face, comme lors d'un regard mutuel) et non pas pour des regards détournés (les yeux seraient alors orientés à droite ou à gauche) (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000 ;Farroni, Menon, & Johnson, 2006). Par ailleurs, les enfants de 4 semaines passent un temps impressionnant à regarder les yeux d'un étranger, ce qui fait de cette partie du visage un lieu privilégié d'échange d'informations entre deux partenaires (Blass & Camp, 2004). ...
... For example, the famous "top-heavy" configuration has been shown to attract the attention of newborns, meaning that newborns prefer certain facial geometric patterns (Simion et al., 2002). Furthermore, Batki et al. (2000) showed that newborns spend more time looking at faces with open eyes than at faces with closed eyes. This showed that eyes, when combined with the geometric face pattern, serves as an important cue to grab the infants' attention. ...
Pupil contagion is the phenomenon in which an observer’s pupil-diameter changes in response to another person’s pupil. Even chimpanzees and infants in early development stages show pupil contagion. This study investigated whether dynamic changes in pupil diameter would induce changes in infants’ pupil diameter. We also investigated pupil contagion in the context of different faces. We measured the pupil-diameter of 50 five- to six-month-old infants in response to changes in the pupil diameter (dilating/constricting) of upright and inverted faces. The results showed that (1) in the upright presentation condition, dilating the pupil diameter induced a change in the infants’ pupil diameter while constricting the pupil diameter did not induce a change, and (2) pupil contagion occurred only in the upright face presentation, and not in the inverted face presentation. These results indicate the face-inversion effect in infants’ pupil contagion.
... Since the first days of life, human and non-human primates are sensitive to eye-contact with their caregivers and it has been demonstrated that direct gazing can improve social skills in the long term (Simpson et al. 2019). Experimental data indicate that human neonates show a preference for faces with open eyes (Batki et al. 2000) and that engage in direct gazing (Farroni et al. 2002). Similar findings have been obtained in infants of great apes. ...
The capacity to promptly and congruently respond to others’ facial signals has at its basis a mirror neuron mechanism. In Rapid (< 1 sec, RFM) and Delayed (1–5 sec, DFM) Facial Mimicry the expression emitted by an individual (trigger) is perceived and replicated by an observer. The occurrence of mimicry phenomena has been demonstrated almost exclusively in the play domain. Here, we aim at evaluating the presence of RFM/DFM during playful interactions between infant bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of the most playful primate species. We video-recorded 435 play sessions between five infants (< 48 months of age) belonging to the bonobo colony hosted at the Wilhelma Zoo (Germany). Via a frame-by-frame video-analysis, we demonstrated the presence of both RFM and DFM. These two phenomena were enhanced by face-to-face interactions between playmates. Hence, the access to others’ faces allows the player to perceive, decode and replicate signals, thus promoting a mutual intersubjective engagement with the partner. The occurrence of DFM suggests that in bonobos, as in chimpanzees, such mirror event is present just starting from infancy. The less automaticity characterizing DFM compared to RFM could be due to the involvement of more complex and time-demanding cognitive processes. Neither RFM nor DFM increased the duration of play sessions. Probably, the mimicry phenomena in infant bonobos are not recruited for manipulating the sessions, which are highly balanced and fair, but possibly for sharing the playful mood between interacting subjects thus increasing their level of familiarity and affiliation.
... The developmental trajectory of gaze following as a learning mechanism is characterized by an early phase in which infants show a preference for upright faces with open eyes and specialization of cortical areas associated with processing gaze cues (Carpenter et al., 1998;D'Entremont, Hains, & Muir, 1997;Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002;Gredebäck, Fikke, & Melinder, 2010;Perra & Gattis, 2012). Indeed, newborns already show a preference for faces with open eyes versus closed eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000) and for upright faces versus inverted faces (Farroni et al., 2002;Farroni, Johnson, & Csibra, 2004). Infants develop the ability to follow the interlocutor's gaze starting at 3 to 4 months of age and gaze-following becomes a stable cue of social communication between 6 and 8 months (D'Entremont et al., 1997;Gredebäck et al., 2010). ...
Understanding language neurobiology in early childhood is essential for characterizing the developmental structural and functional changes that lead to the mature adult language network. In the last two decades, the field of language neurodevelopment has received increasing attention, particularly given the rapid advances in the implementation of neuroimaging techniques and analytic approaches that allow detailed investigations into the developing brain across a variety of cognitive domains. These methodological and analytical advances hold the promise of developing early markers of language outcomes that allow diagnosis and clinical interventions at the earliest stages of development. Here, we argue that findings in language neurobiology need to be integrated within an approach that captures the dynamic nature and inherent variability that characterizes the developing brain and the interplay between behavior and (structural and functional) neural patterns. Accordingly, we describe a framework for understanding language neurobiology in early development, which minimally requires an explicit characterization of the following core domains: i) computations underlying language learning mechanisms, ii) developmental patterns of change across neural and behavioral measures, iii) environmental variables that reinforce language learning (e.g., the social context), and iv) brain maturational constraints for optimal neural plasticity, which determine the infant's sensitivity to learning from the environment. We discuss each of these domains in the context of recent behavioral and neuroimaging findings and consider the need for quantitatively modeling two main sources of variation: individual differences or trait-like patterns of variation and within-subject differences or state-like patterns of variation. The goal is to enable models that allow prediction of language outcomes from neural measures that take into account these two types of variation. Finally, we examine how future methodological approaches would benefit from the inclusion of more ecologically valid paradigms that complement and allow generalization of traditional controlled laboratory methods.
... Without further studies that begin at birth or hatching, and control for exposure to all eyes or eye-like stimuli, it is impossible to conclude that gaze aversion is innate. There is some evidence that attention to eyes or eye-like stimuli may be innate by our definition (see e.g., Batki et al., 2000;Sewards and Sewards, 2002 for evidence from human neonates and other amniotes), and this may facilitate early development of gaze aversion. An evolved mechanism for attending to eye-like stimuli, and an ability to learn quickly, would provide animals with the capacity to use gaze cues without the need for perspective-taking. ...
Whilst humans undisputedly shape and transform most of earth's habitats, the number of animals (domestic and wild) living on this planet far outnumbers that of humans. Inevitably, humans have to interact with animals under a variety of circumstances, such as during conservation efforts, wildlife and zoo management, livestock husbandry, and pet keeping. Next to the question of how humans deal with these interactions and conflicts, it is crucial to understand the animal's point of view:
How do animals perceive and differentiate between humans?
How do they generalize their behavior towards humans?
And how does knowledge about humans spread socially?
In this Research Topic, we aim to collect original empirical work and review articles to get a more comprehensive and diverse picture on how humans are part of the sensory and cognitive world of non-human animals. We strongly invite contributions that pinpoint shortcomings and limitations in interpreting the available research findings, that provide new cross-disciplinary frameworks (e.g. links between conservation biology and comparative psychology, or human-animal interactions at zoos and animal welfare) and that discuss the applied implementation of these findings (e.g. for conservation attempts or livestock husbandry management).
... In conclusion, preferential orientation toward direct gaze seems to be present soon after birth and to prime autonomous physiological activity. Furthermore, it seems to depend (i) on the presence of a specific facial configuration that maintains the spatial relationships between the components of the face (Farroni et al., 2002;Farroni et al., 2006Farroni et al., , 2007 and is used to identify the direction of gaze (Baron-Cohen, 1994), and/or(ii) on a collection of visual perceptual properties (Batki et al., 2000;Langton et al., 2000;Simion & Giorgio, 2015). In our opinion, these three theories (Baron-Cohen, 1994;Simion & Giorgio, 2015) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ...
The eyes and the gaze are important stimuli for social interaction in humans. Impaired recognition of facial identity, facial emotions, and inference of the intentions of others may result from difficulties in extracting information relevant to the eye region, mainly the direction of gaze. Therefore, a review of these data is of interest. Behavioral data demonstrating the importance of the eye region and how humans respond to gaze direction are reviewed narratively, and several theoretical models on how visual information on gaze is processed are discussed to propose a unified hypothesis. Several issues that have not yet been investigated are identified. The authors tentatively suggest experiments that might help progress research in this area. The neural aspects are subsequently reviewed to best describe the low-level and higher-level visual information processing stages in the targeted subcortical and cortical areas. A specific neural network is proposed on the basis of the literature. Various gray areas, such as the temporality of the processing of visual information, the question of salience priority, and the coordination between the two hemispheres, remain unclear and require further investigations. Finally, disordered gaze direction detection mechanisms and their consequences on social cognition and behavior are discussed as key deficiencies in several conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder, 22q11.2 deletion, schizophrenia, and social anxiety disorder. This narrative review provides significant additional data showing that the detection and perception of someone’s gaze is an essential part of the development of our social brain.
... To further quantify abnormalities in gaze behavior, numerous studies have utilized eye tracking to record the gaze of children with and without ASD as they observe different images and movies. Several studies have demonstrated that typically developing infants and toddlers exhibit a strong preference for gazing at stimulus features that are important for social interaction, such as the eyes region in faces (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002;Frank et al., 2009;Haith et al., 1977;Johnson et al., 1991), faces in general (Frank et al., 2009;Johnsonet al., 1991) and biological motion (Simion et al., 2008). In contrast, children with ASD exhibit less fixations to the eyes region (Frazier et al., 2017;Jones et al., 2008;Jones & Klin, 2013), less fixations to the face in general (Chawarska et al., 2012;Frazier et al., 2017;Shic et al., 2011), and a weaker preference for biological motion (Klin et al., 2009;Todorova et al., 2019). ...
A variety of eye tracking studies have demonstrated that young children with ASD gaze at images and movies of social interactions differently than typically developing children. These findings have supported the hypothesis that gaze behavior differences are generated by a weaker preference for social stimuli in ASD children. The hypothesis assumes that gaze differences are not caused by abnormalities in oculomotor function including saccade frequency and kinematics. Previous studies of oculomotor function have mostly been performed with school-age children, adolescents, and adults using visual search, anti-saccade, and gap saccade tasks that are less suitable for young pre-school children. Here, we examined oculomotor function in 144 children (90 with ASD and 54 controls), 1–10-years-old, as they watched two animated movies interleaved with the presentation of multiple salient stimuli that elicited saccades-to-targets. The results revealed that the number of fixations, fixation duration, number of saccades, saccade duration, saccade accuracy, and saccade latency did not differ significantly across groups. Minor initial differences in saccade peak velocity were not supported by analysis with a linear mixed model. These findings suggest that most children with ASD exhibit similar oculomotor function to that of controls, when performing saccades-to-targets or freely viewing child-friendly movies. This suggests that previously reported gaze abnormalities in children with ASD are not due to underlying oculomotor deficiencies.
Lay Summary
This study demonstrates that children with ASD perform similar eye movements to those of controls when freely observing movies or making eye movements to targets. Similar results were apparent across groups in the number of eye movements, their accuracy, duration, and other measures that assess eye movement control. These findings are important for interpreting previously reported differences in gaze behavior of children with ASD, which are likely due to atypical social preferences rather than impaired control of eye movements.
... This preference is crucial for infants to detect potential interaction partners and to structure and filter the large amount of information they are confronted with (Reid & Striano, 2007). Newborns preferentially orient to face-like over nonface patterns (Goren, Sarty, & Wu, 1975), show enhanced neural processing of direct over averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002), spend more time looking at faces with opened than closed eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000), and prefer looking at biological motion over random motion patterns (Simion, Regolin, & Bulf, 2008). During the first year of life, infants' social perception matures as their visual system, their practical experiences, and their understanding of others develop (Bertenthal & Boyer, 2015). ...
This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants' visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5-to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7-to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with a scene showing two adults acting individually. Moreover, older infants showed higher social engagement (including joint attention) during parent-infant free play. Experiment 2 replicated this age-related increase in both measures and showed that it follows continuous trajectories from 7 to 13.5 months (n = 50). This suggests that infants' attentional orienting to others' interactions coincides with parallel developments in their social attention behavior during own social interactions.
... In this paradigm, the expression was also triggered by an eye-region fixation. Given what we understand about infant-adult social exchanges (e.g., Batki et al., 2000;Murray & Trevarthen, 1986), this decision was ecologically (not just practically) motivated. This does however limit our method to expressions both initiated by and directed toward the infant, rather than those triggered by other internal or external events. ...
Despite being inherently dynamic phenomena, much of our understanding of how infants attend and scan facial expressions is based on static face stimuli. Here we investigate how six-, nine-, and twelve-month infants allocate their visual attention toward dynamic-interactive videos of the six basic emotional expressions, and compare their responses with static images of the same stimuli. We find infants show clear differences in how they attend and scan dynamic and static expressions, looking longer toward the dynamic-face and lower-face regions. Infants across all age groups show differential interest in expressions, and show precise scanning of regions “diagnostic” for emotion recognition. These data also indicate that infants' attention toward dynamic expressions develops over the first year of life, including relative increases in interest and scanning precision toward some negative facial expressions (e.g., anger, fear, and disgust).
... Research into the perceptual preferences of newborn human infants has consistently demonstrated their preference for looking at faces with open eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000) and direct gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002;Farroni et al., 2005). Along with perceptual biases toward faces in general ( Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991), biological motion (Simion, Regolin, & Bulf, 2008), and voices (Vouloumanos, Hauser, Werker, & Martin, 2010), this preference ensures that the infant will preferentially orient toward other people. ...
Infants' ability to coordinate their attention with other people develops profoundly across the first year of life. Mainly based on experimental research focusing on infants' behavior under highly controlled conditions, developmental milestones were identified and explained in the past by prominent theories in terms of the onset of specific cognitive skills. In contrast to this approach, recent longitudinal research challenges this perspective with findings suggesting that social attention develops continuously with a gradual refinement of skills. Informed by these findings, we argue for an interactionist and dynamical systems view that bases observable advances in infant social attention skills on increasingly fine-tuned mutual adjustments in the caregiver-infant dyad, resulting in gradually improving mutual prediction. We present evidence for this view from recent studies leveraging new technologies which afford the opportunity to dynamically track social interactions in real-time. These new technically-sophisticated studies offer unprecedented insights into the dynamic processes of infant-caregiver social attention. It is now possible to track in much greater detail fluctuations over time with regard to object-directed attention as well as social attention and how these processes relate to one another. Encouraged by these initial results and new insights from this interactionist developmental social neuroscience approach, we conclude with a “call to action” in which we advocate for more ecologically valid paradigms for studying social attention as a dynamic and bi-directional process.
... Infants preferentially attend to communicative signals from birth. Newborns look longer at faces with opened than closed eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000), show enhanced neural processing of direct over averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002), and orient toward infant-directed over adult-directed speech (Cooper & Aslin, 1990). In the second half of the first year of life, infants are also attentive to social interactions between others. ...
Infants are attentive to third‐party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13‐month‐old infants (N = 32) selectively learn cue–target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) or the same adults acting individually (non‐interactive control). Infants performed faster saccadic latencies and more predictive gaze shifts toward the cued target region during social interaction trials. These findings suggest that social interaction targets can serve as primary reinforcers in an associative learning task, supporting the view that infants find it intrinsically valuable to observe others’ interactions.
... Evidence from various studies indicated that new-borns demonstrate innate preparedness to recognize these signals or cues (E.g. Batki et al. 2000;Teresa et al., 2002;Marcela et al., 2003;Vouloumanos, 2007; cited in -not only from their parents but also from unfamiliar people or non-human sources (Watson, 1972). ...
Part 1 The theory of Natural Pedagogy as proposed by Csibra and Gergely (2006, 2010) has provided a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of cultural learning. The theory suggested that ostensive communication in early interaction between the mother-infant dyad plays a crucial role in facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge. The three ostensive cues identified in that theory are eye contact, being addressed by name and contingent responsivity. This conceptual introduction provides a detailed review of the theory as well as the relevant literature. A critical evaluation of the empirical evidence presented in the body of literature suggests there are major limitations within that evidence, which as a consequence makes the empirical evidence fall short of offering robust support to the theory. This paper concludes by calling for development of a new instrument which allows for collecting data that is necessary for addressing these limitations. Part 2 Aim: (1) To develop the Ostensive Communication Coding System (OCCS). (2) To establish the psychometric properties of the OCCS. Method: Establish the behavioural operational definition and measurements of four ostensive communication – Eye contact, Name addressing, Infant Directed Speech and Contingent responsivity. Apply the OCCS to code videos of mother-infant interaction in two learning paradigms. Due to the occurrence of Covid-19, data collection was interrupted. The second aim of the study could not be fully achieved because of insufficient sample size. 14 infants aged 16 to 22 months took part in the study with their mother. Their interaction in the two learning paradigms are coded with OCCCS. Result: Interrater reliability of OCCS was assessed via intraclass correlation coefficients. Interrater reliability was excellent for all the scale components (> .90). Construct validity was tested with Parenting Stress Index, Fourth Edition Short Form (PSI-4-SF) and The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) via quasi-qualitative method, individual patterns of scores were observed. The results provided supportive evidence of the construct validity of OCCS Conclusion: The OCCS is likely to be a reliable and valid instruction to assess ostensive communication in natural pedagogical situation. Implications for future development are discussed.
... First, they engage in mutual eye contact with their social partner. Newborns look longer at faces with open eyes than faces with closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000). They also prefer faces with direct gaze with which they can engage in mutual eye contact, as evidenced by their preference for direct gaze only for upright and not for inverted faces (Farroni et al., 2002(Farroni et al., , 2004. ...
Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role of eye gaze in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants (0–24 months) in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: (1) vocabulary development, (2) word–object mapping, (3) object processing, and (4) speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains (e.g., speech processing) are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board.
... Research into the perceptual preferences of newborn human infants has consistently demonstrated their preference for looking at faces with open eyes (Batki et al., 2000) and direct gaze (Farroni et al., 2002. Along with perceptual biases toward faces in general (Johnson et al., 1991), biological motion (Simion et al., 2008), and voices (Vouloumanos et al., 2010), this preference ensures that the infant will preferentially orient toward other people. ...
Infants’ ability to coordinate their attention with other people develops profoundly across the first year of life. Mainly based on experimental research focusing on infants’ behavior under highly controlled conditions, developmental milestones were identified and explained in the past by prominent theories in terms of the onset of specific cognitive skills. In contrast to this approach, recent longitudinal research challenges this perspective with findings suggesting that social attention develops continuously with a gradual refinement of skills. Informed by these findings, we argue for an interactionist and dynamical systems view that bases observable advances in infant social attention skills on increasingly fine-tuned mutual adjustments in the caregiver infant dyad, resulting in gradually improving mutual prediction. We present evidence for this view from recent studies leveraging new technologies which afford the opportunity to dynamically track social interactions in real-time. These new technically-sophisticated studies offer unprecedented insights into the dynamic processes of infant-caregiver social attention. It is now possible to track in much greater detail fluctuations over time with regard to object-directed attention as well as social attention and how these processes relate to one another. Encouraged by these initial results and new insights from this interactionist developmental social neuroscience approach, we conclude with a ‘call to action’ in which we advocate for more ecologically valid paradigms for studying social attention as a dynamic and bi-directional process.
... Without further studies that begin at birth or hatching, and control for exposure to all eyes or eye-like stimuli, it is impossible to conclude that gaze aversion is innate. There is some evidence that attention to eyes or eye-like stimuli may be innate by our definition (see e.g., Batki et al., 2000;Sewards and Sewards, 2002 for evidence from human neonates and other amniotes), and this may facilitate early development of gaze aversion. An evolved mechanism for attending to eye-like stimuli, and an ability to learn quickly, would provide animals with the capacity to use gaze cues without the need for perspective-taking. ...
Humans have a profound effect on the planet's ecosystems, and unprecedented rates of human population growth and urbanization have brought wild animals into increasing contact with people. For many species, appropriate responses toward humans are likely to be critical to survival and reproductive success. Although numerous studies have investigated the impacts of human activity on biodiversity and species distributions, relatively few have examined the effects of humans on the behavioral responses of animals during human-wildlife encounters, and the cognitive processes underpinning those responses. Furthermore, while humans often present a significant threat to animals, the presence or behavior of people may be also associated with benefits, such as food rewards. In scenarios where humans vary in their behavior, wild animals would be expected to benefit from the ability to discriminate between dangerous, neutral and rewarding people. Additionally, individual differences in cognitive and behavioral phenotypes and past experiences with humans may affect animals' ability to exploit human-dominated environments and respond appropriately to human cues. In this review, we examine the cues that wild animals use to modulate their behavioral responses toward humans, such as human facial features and gaze direction. We discuss when wild animals are expected to attend to certain cues, how information is used, and the cognitive mechanisms involved. We consider how the cognitive abilities of wild animals are likely to be under selection by humans and therefore influence population and community composition. We conclude by highlighting the need for long-term studies on free-living, wild animals to fully understand the causes and ecological consequences of variation in responses to human cues. The effects of humans on wildlife behavior are likely to be substantial, and a detailed understanding of these effects is key to implementing effective conservation strategies and managing human-wildlife conflict.
Among a variety of entities in their environment, what do humans consider alive or animate and how does this attribution of animacy promote development of more abstract levels of mentalizing? By decontextualizing the environment of bodily features, we review how physical movements give rise to perceived animacy in Heider-Simmel style animations. We discuss the developmental course of how perceived animacy shapes our interpretation of the social world, and specifically discuss when and how children transition from perceiving actions as goal-directed to attributing behaviors to unobservable mental states. This transition from a teleological stance, asserting a goal-oriented interpretation to an agent's actions, to a mentalistic stance allows older children to reason about more complex actions guided by hidden beliefs. The acquisition of these more complex cognitive behaviors happens developmentally at the same time neural systems for social cognition are coming online in young children. We review perceptual, developmental, and neural evidence to identify the joint cognitive and neural changes associated with when children begin to mentalize and how this ability is instantiated in the brain.
For a long time, newborns were considered as human beings devoid of perceptual abilities who had to learn with effort everything about their physical and social environment. Extensive empirical evidence gathered in the last decades has systematically invalidated this notion. Despite the relatively immature state of their sensory modalities, newborns have perceptions that are acquired, and are triggered by, their contact with the environment. More recently, the study of the fetal origins of the sensory modes has revealed that in utero all the senses prepare to operate, except for the vision mode, which is only functional starting from the first minutes after birth. This discrepancy between the maturation of the different senses leads to the question of how human newborns come to understand our multimodal and complex environment. More precisely, how the visual mode interacts with the tactile and auditory modes from birth. After having defined the tools that newborns use to interact with other sensory modalities, we review studies across different fields of research such as the intermodal transfer between touch and vision, auditory-visual speech perception, and the existence of links between the dimensions of space, time, and number. Overall, evidence from these studies supports the idea that human newborns are spontaneously driven, and cognitively equipped, to link information collected by the different sensory modes in order to create a representation of a stable world.
The purpose of this study was to explore how young children’s vocal and facial cues contribute to conveying to adults important information about children’s attributes when presented together. In particular, the study aimed to disentangle whether children’s vocal or facial cues, if either, are more dominant when both types of cues are displayed in a contradictory mode. To do this, we assigned 127 college students to one of three between-participants conditions. In the Voices-Only condition, participants listened to four pairs of synthetized voices simulating the voices of 4-5-year-old and 9-10-year-old children verbalizing a neutral-content sentence. Participants needed to indicate which voice was better associated with a series of 14 attributes organized into four trait dimensions (Positive Affect, Negative Affect, Intelligence, and Helpless), potentially meaningful in young child–adult interactions. In the Consistent condition, the same four pairs of voices delivered in the Voices-Only condition were presented jointly with morphed photographs of children’s faces of equivalent age. In the Inconsistent condition, the four pairs of voices and faces were paired in a contradictory manner (immature voices with mature faces vs. mature voices with immature faces). Results revealed that vocal cues were more effective than facial cues in conveying young children’s attributes to adults and that women were more efficient (i.e., faster) than men in responding to children’s cues. These results confirm and extend previous evidence on the relevance of children’s vocal cues to signaling important information about children’s attributes and needs during their first 6 years of life.
A figyelem az életünk meghatározó része, a legapróbb cselekedeteinket is átszövi kora gyermekkortól egészen az időskorig. Mindenki tud példát mondani arra, amikor figyelt, amikor valamire direkt nem figyelt, amikor észrevett valami változást, amit mások nem, amikor elfáradt és nem tudott tovább figyelni, és arra is, amikor felfrissült és újra oda tudott figyelni. Persze ebben nagyok az egyéni különbségek, hiszen arra, hogy mire, mennyire és hogyan figyelünk, hat az, hogy milyen természetűek vagyunk. Az viszont mindenkire igaz, hogy figyelem nélkül sok szórakoztató tevékenységet nem tudnánk gyakorolni. A figyelmi képességünk alapvető, elválaszthatatlan része a kommunikációnak, a digitális eszközhasználatnak, a sportnak és a művészetnek. Ugyanakkor a figyelmi képességeink alapvetőségének akkor kerülünk igazán tudatába, amikor valamelyik „része” hiányzik. A figyelmi deficitek széles körben megjelennek a neuropszichológiától a különböző függőségeken át a figyelemhiányos hiperaktivitás-zavarig. Jelen kötet célja közérthetően bemutatni a figyelem (kognitív) pszichológiájának sokszínűségét és egyes aspektusainak gyakorlati relevanciáját olyan alkalmazott szemlélettel, amely érthető az érdeklődő laikusoknak és hasznára lehet számos diszciplínában tanuló (jövőbeli) szakembernek.
Previous studies found an onset of holistic face processing in the age range between 0–4 and 7 months of age. To validate these studies, the present study investigated infants 4 and 7 months of age with a different experimental approach. In a habituation‐dishabituation experiment, the infants were tested with stereoscopic stimuli in which stripes floated above a face, thereby occluding some parts of the face (amodal completion condition), and stereoscopic stimuli in which the same face parts floated above stripes (modal completion condition). Research with adults indicates that faces are processed holistically, that is as global wholes, in the amodal, but as independent parts in the modal completion condition, resulting in superior face recognition when the occluding bars are in front of than when they are behind the visible face parts. The present study found that infants regardless of whether they are 4 or 7 months old reliably recognized and differentiated the faces in the amodal but not in the modal completion condition. Moreover, the difference between the experimental conditions was statistically significant. These findings show that approximately at the age of 4–7 months of life, infants begin to holistically unify disjoint face parts into a coherent whole.
El artículo estudia el valor profundo de la mirada al otro al comienzo de la vida desde la psicología, en el crecimiento de la vida desde algunos autores de la filosofía y algunos rasgos de la sociología y en el final de la vida desde el acompañamiento a la persona en un caso real. En este final de la vida podemos observar cinco momentos en la evolución de la mirada, algunos de los cuales son la otra cara de la mirada al comienzo de la vida.
It has been proposed that humans automatically compute the visual perspective of others. Evidence for this view comes from the Dot Perspective Task. In this task, participants view a room in which a human actor is depicted, looking either leftwards or rightwards. Dots can appear on either the left wall of the room, the right wall, or both. At the start of each trial, participants are shown a number. Their speeded task is to decide whether the number of dots visible matches the number shown. On consistent trials the participant and the actor can see the same number of dots. On inconsistent trials, the participant and the actor can see a different number of dots. Participants respond faster on consistent trials than on inconsistent trials. This self-consistency effect is cited as evidence that participants compute the visual perspective of others automatically, even when it impedes their task performance. According to a rival interpretation, however, this effect is a product of attention cueing: slower responding on inconsistent trials simply reflects the fact that participants' attention is directed away from some or all of the to-be-counted dots. The present study sought to test these rival accounts. We find that desk fans, a class of inanimate object known to cue attention, also produce the self-consistency effect. Moreover, people who are more susceptible to the effect induced by fans tend to be more susceptible to the effect induced by human actors. These findings suggest that the self-consistency effect is a product of attention cueing.
This review summarizes human perception and processing of face and gaze signals. Face and gaze signals are important means of non-verbal social communication. The review highlights that: (1) some evidence is available suggesting that the perception and processing of facial information starts in the prenatal period; (2) the perception and processing of face identity, expression and gaze direction is highly context specific, the effect of race and culture being a case in point. Culture affects by means of experiential shaping and social categorization the way in which information on face and gaze is collected and perceived; (3) face and gaze processing occurs in the so-called ‘social brain’. Accumulating evidence suggests that the processing of facial identity, facial emotional expression and gaze involves two parallel and interacting pathways: a fast and crude subcortical route and a slower cortical pathway. The flow of information is bi-directional and includes bottom-up and top-down processing. The cortical networks particularly include the fusiform gyrus, superior temporal sulcus (STS), intraparietal sulcus, temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex.
Tanulmányunkban arra teszünk kísérletet, hogy áttekintsük a hazai pszichológiai életben megjelenő és egyre markánsabb szerepet játszó evolúciós megközelítéseket. Bemutatjuk a 30 évvel ezelőtti állapotokat és azokat a neves kutatókat, akik az evolúciós pszichológia magyarországi létrejötte mellett bábáskodtak. Ezt követően részletesen is beszámolunk azokról a kutatásokról, amelyek a két nagy hazai evolúciós kutatóműhelyben jöttek létre, nevezetesen a Pécsi Evolúciós Pszichológia Kutatócsoportban és az MTA–ELTE Összehasonlító Etológiai Kutatócsoportból kinőtt teamekben. Végül röviden bemutatjuk azokat az eredményeket, amelyek e két nagy műhelyen kívül születtek egy-egy pszichológiai jelenség evolúciós értelmezése kapcsán.
In our paper, we make an attempt to overview those evolutionary approaches that have developed and become increasingly influencing in the Hungarian psychological life. We show the conditions 30 years ago, and those gifted scholars who contributed to the development of evolutionary psychology in Hungary. Then, we give a detailed review on the studies that have been fulfilled in the two basic research centers in Hungary: the Evolutionary Psychology Research Group of Pécs, and the MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethological Team. Finally, we describe the scientific results that have been achieved in the interpretation of specific psychological phenomena outside these main research centers.
Typically-developing (TD) children under age 5 often deny that they can see a person whose eyes are covered (e.g., Moll & Khalulyan, 2017). This has been interpreted as a manifestation of their preference for reciprocal interactions. We investigated how 3- to 4-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 12) respond in this situation. Because a lack of interpersonal connectedness and reciprocal communication are core features of this disorder, we predicted that young children with ASD will not make mutual regard a condition for seeing another person and therefore acknowledge being able to see her. Against this prediction, children with ASD gave the same negative answers as a group of TD (n = 36) age-mates. Various interpretations are discussed, including the possibility that some children with ASD are capable of relating to others as second persons.
Faces, as a class of objects, have been studied extensively in order to understand how the human visual system recognizes and represents objects. In this paper we studied the ontogeny of the ability to perceive gaze direction. We bring together both developmental research and neurophysiological and neuropsychological research in order to address this issue. In two experiments we explored the developmental time course of the ability to discriminate between direct and averted gaze, a task thought to involve cortical information processing of faces. We found that (a) infants as young as four months could discriminate between direct and averted gaze, (b) this ability was not due to the development of low-level visual processes, and (c) younger infants did not show reliable evidence of gaze discrimination. In an additional experiment we tested adults to study the effect of face context on the ability to discriminate gaze direction. Adult subjects were more sensitive in this discrimination when the eyes were in the context of an upright face than when the eyes were in either an inverted face or in a scrambled face. Taken together, these results suggest that the mechanisms underlying gaze detection may be mediated by cortical circuits also involved in other aspects of face recognition.
The face communicates an impressive amount of visual information. We use it to identify its owner, how they are feeling and to help us understand what they are saying. Models of face processing have considered how we extract such meaning from the face but have ignored another important signal – eye gaze. In this article we begin by reviewing evidence from recent neurophysiological studies that suggests that the eyes constitute a special stimulus in at least two senses. First, the structure of the eyes is such that it provides us with a particularly powerful signal to the direction of another person’s gaze, and second, we may have evolved neural mechanisms devoted to gaze processing. As a result, gaze direction is analysed rapidly and automatically, and is able to trigger reflexive shifts of an observer’s visual attention. However, understanding where another individual is directing their attention involves more than simply analysing their gaze direction. We go on to describe research with adult participants, children and non-human primates that suggests that other cues such as head orientation and pointing gestures make significant contributions to the computation of another’s direction of attention.
his paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: research on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into social cognition, addressing our tendency to attend in the direction that another person looks. Cueing methodologies from mainstream attention research were adapted to test the automaticity of orienting in the direction of seen gaze. Three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter-discrimination task. Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face. This suggests reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. Experiment 3 found faster letter discrimination on the side the computerized face gazed towards even when participants knew that target letters were four times as likely on the opposite side. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even when counter to intentions. The experiments illustrate that methods from mainstream attention research can be usefully applied to social cognition, and that studies of spatial attention may profit from considering its social function.
Cortical neurons that are selectively sensitive to faces, parts of faces and particular facial expressions are concentrated in the banks and floor of the superior temporal sulcus in macaque monkeys. Their existence has prompted suggestions that it is damage to such a region in the human brain that leads to prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize faces or to discriminate between faces. This was tested by removing the face-cell area in a group of monkeys. The animals learned to discriminate between pictures of faces or inanimate objects, to select the odd face from a group, to inspect a face then select the matching face from a pair of faces after a variable delay, to discriminate between novel and familiar faces, and to identify specific faces. Removing the face-cell area produced no or little impairment which in the latter case was not specific for faces. In contrast, several prosopagnosic patients were impaired at several of these tasks. The animals were less able than before to discern the angle of regard in pictures of faces, suggesting that this area of the brain may be concerned with the perception of facial expression and bearing, which are important social signals in primates.
Cells selectively responsive to the face have been found in several visual sub-areas of temporal cortex in the macaque brain. These include the lateral and ventral surfaces of inferior temporal cortex and the upper bank, lower bank and fundus of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). Cells in the different regions may contribute in different ways to the processing of the facial image. Within the upper bank of the STS different populations of cells are selective for different views of the face and head. These cells occur in functionally discrete patches (3-5 mm across) within the STS cortex. Studies of output connections from the STS also reveal a modular anatomical organization of repeating 3-5 mm patches connected to the parietal cortex, an area thought to be involved in spatial awareness and in the control of attention. The properties of some cells suggest a role in the discrimination of heads from other objects, and in the recognition of familiar individuals. The selectivity for view suggests that the neural operations underlying face or head recognition rely on parallel analyses of different characteristic views of the head, the outputs of these view-specific analyses being subsequently combined to support view-independent (object-centred) recognition. An alternative functional interpretation of the sensitivity to head view is that the cells enable an analysis of 'social attention', i.e. they signal where other individuals are directing their attention. A cell maximally responsive to the left profile thus provides a signal that the attention (of another individual) is directed to the observer's left. Such information is useful for analysing social interactions between other individuals.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Goren, Sarty, and Wu (1975) claimed that newborn infants will follow a slowly moving schematic face stimulus with their head and eyes further than they will follow scrambled faces or blank stimuli. Despite the far-reaching theoretical importance of this finding, it has remained controversial and been largely ignored. In Experiment 1 we replicate the basic findings of the study. In Experiment 2 we attempt a second replication in a different maternity hospital, and extend the original findings with evidence suggesting that both the particular configuration of features, and some aspects of the features themselves, are important for preferential tracking in the first hour of life. In Experiment 3 we use a different technique to trace the preferential tracking of faces over the first five months of life. The preferential tracking of faces declines during the second month. The possible causes and consequences of this observation are discussed.
Evidence from newborns leads to the conclusion that infants are born with some information about the structure of faces. This structural information, termed CONSPEC, guides the preference for facelike patterns found in newborn infants. CONSPEC is contrasted with a device termed CONLERN, which is responsible for learning about the visual characteristics of conspecifics. In the human infant, CONLERN does not influence looking behavior until 2 months of age. The distinction between these 2 independent mechanisms allows a reconciliation of the conflicting data on the development of face recognition in human infants. Finally, evidence from another species, the domestic chick, for which a similar 2-process theory has already been put forward, is discussed. The new nomenclature is applied to the chick and used as a basis for comparison with the infant.
The direction of eye gaze and orientation of the face towards or away from another are important social signals for man and for macaque monkey. We have studied the effects of these signals in a region of the macaque temporal cortex where cells have been found to be responsive to the sight of faces. Of cells selectively responsive to the sight of the face or head but not to other objects (182 cells) 63% were sensitive to the orientation of the head. Different views of the head (full face, profile, back or top of the head, face rotated by 45 degrees up to the ceiling or down to the floor) maximally activated different classes of cell. All classes of cell, however, remained active as the preferred view was rotated isomorphically or was changed in size or distance. Isomorphic rotation by 90-180 degrees increased cell response latencies by 10-60 ms. Sensitivity to gaze direction was found for 64% of the cells tested that were tuned to head orientation. Eighteen cells most responsive to the full face preferred eye contact, while 18 cells tuned to the profile face preferred averted gaze. Sensitivity to gaze was thus compatible with, but could be independent of, sensitivity to head orientation. Results suggest that the recognition of one type of object may proceed via the independent high level analysis of several restricted views of the object (viewer-centred descriptions).
Bartlett viewed thinking as a high level skill exhibiting ballistic properties that he called its “point of no return”. This paper explores one aspect of cognition through the use of a simple model task in which human subjects are asked to commit attention to a position in visual space other than fixation. This instruction is executed by orienting a covert (attentional) mechanism that seems sufficiently time locked to external events that its trajectory can be traced across the visual field in terms of momentary changes in the efficiency of detecting stimuli. A comparison of results obtained with alert monkeys, brain injured and normal human subjects shows the relationship of this covert system to saccadic eye movements and to various brain systems controlling perception and motion. In accordance with Bartlett's insight, the possibility is explored that similar principles apply to orienting of attention toward sensory input and orienting to the semantic structures used in thinking.
Four experiments are reported that were aimed at elucidating some of the controversial issues concerning the preference for facelike patterns in newborns. The experiments were devised to contrast the original and the revised versions of the sensory hypothesis and the structural hypothesis as accounts of face preference in newborns. Experiments 1A and 1B supported the structural hypothesis by showing a visual preference for the stimulus for which components were located in the correct arrangement for a human face. Experiment 2 supported the sensory hypothesis by showing a visual preference for stimuli that were designed to have the optimal spatial frequency components for the newborn visual system. Experiment 3 showed that babies directed attention to a facelike pattern also when it was presented simultaneously with a nonfacelike stimulus with optimal spatial frequency for the newborn visual system.
We sought to determine whether regions of extrastriate visual cortex could be activated in subjects viewing eye and mouth movements that occurred within a stationary face. Eleven subjects participated in three to five functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions in which they viewed moving eyes, moving mouths, or movements of check patterns that occurred in the same spatial location as the eyes or mouth. In each task, the stimuli were superimposed on a radial background pattern that continually moved inward to control for the effect of movement per se. Activation evoked by the radial background was assessed in a separate control task. Moving eyes and mouths activated a bilateral region centered in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). The moving check patterns did not appreciably activate the STS or surrounding regions. The activation by moving eyes and mouths was distinct from that elicited by the moving radial background, which primarily activated the posterior-temporal-occipital fossa and the lateral occipital sulcus-a region corresponding to area MT/V5. Area MT/V5 was also strongly activated by moving eyes and to a lesser extent by other moving stimuli. These results suggest that a superior temporal region centered in the STS is preferentially involved in the perception of gaze direction and mouth movements. This region of the STS may be functionally related to nearby superior temporal regions thought to be involved in lip-reading and in the perception of hand and body movement.
Evidence from preference studies suggests that infants can discriminate face and non-face patterns and usually prefer to look longer at face-like patterns. This face preference is present at birth. Recognition memory studies demonstrate that the learning curve for face and non-face patterns differ. On the basis of this and other evidence, some have suggested that faces represent an ecologically privileged class of stimuli and that there is a qualitative difference between the recognition and identification of face and non-face patterns.
Others note that the recognition of faces requires many generalized abilities and suggest it is not qualitatively different from the perception of non-face patterns. For example, the very young infant’s preference for face-like patterns is reduced when face and non-face patterns are equated for visibility (based on amplitude spectra). Most neonates treat faces as abstract patterns and base their preferences for patterns on visibility. Categorization of abstracts and faces uses the same mechanism and processes. Increased experience with faces leads to different categorizations for faces than for abstracts, based on different cues.
Four experiments investigate the hypothesis that cues to the direction of another's social attention produce a reflexive orienting of an observer's visual attention. Participants were asked to make a simple detection response to a target letter which could appear at one of four locations on a visual display. Before the presentation of the target, one of these possible locations was cued by the orientation of a digitized head stimulus, which appeared at fixation in the centre of the display. Uninformative and to-be-ignored cueing stimuli produced faster target detection latencies at cued relative to uncued locations, but only when the cues appeared 100 msec before the onset of the target (Experiments 1 and 2). The effect was uninfluenced by the introduction of a to-be-attended and relatively informative cue (Experiment 3), but was disrupted by the inversion of the head cues (Experiment 4). It is argued that these findings are consistent with the operation of a reflexive, stimulus-driven or exogenous orienting mechanism which can be engaged by social attention signals.
Morton, Johnson, and Maurer (1990) have proposed a template-matching model to explain infants' preferences among facelike and abstract patterns as reported in a previous article (Kleiner, 1987). Problems with template models are noted. A model which relies primarily on the linear systems model and secondarily on pattern structure is discussed.
recent evidence indicates that the cerebral cortex is extremely sensitive to experiential factors early in life / some of the extrinsic and intrinsic factors that constrain this plasticity are briefly reviewed / focus on the developmental consequence of one particular intrinsic constraint, cortical parcellation, on infants' ability to detect the direction of eye gaze in face stimuli / preliminary data from study of four-mo-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm are presented / results are discussed in terms of findings from single cell recordings in the macaque and from studies with adult prosopagnosic patients (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The significance of eye contact for infants was investigated in 80 4–6 mo old children, half male and half female, from Guatemala. After 8 min of isolation, each S was seated facing the mother or a female stranger; this person looked into the S's eyes for 1 min and then slightly above the S's head for 1 min, or vice versa. The S's fixation on the face of the other person, smiling, vocalization, and crying were recorded by an observer. Few sex differences were found among the Ss; males smiled more often in the presence of the mother. Ss looked more at the stranger than at the mothers, especially when the stranger first looked at the Ss' eyes. When the mothers first looked in the Ss' eyes, Ss had less interest when they looked away. Results show that eye contact per se is relevant to 5-mo-old infants, and that they can distinguish between their mothers and female strangers and exhibit different behavior in the presence of each. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Normal subjects were presented with a simple line drawing of a face looking left, right, or straight ahead. A target letter
F or T then appeared to the left or the right of the face. All subjects participated in target detection, localization, and
identification response conditions. Although subjects were told that the line drawing’s gaze direction (the cue) did not predict
where the target would occur, response time in all three conditions was reliably faster when gaze was toward versus away from
the target. This study provides evidence for covert, reflexive orienting to peripheral locations in response to uninformative
gaze shifts presented at fixation. The implications for theories of social attention and visual orienting are discussed, and
the brain mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon are considered.
An experimental situation was designed to investigate the differential effects of eye contact and unreciprocated gaze upon GSR activity. Twenty male and twenty female subjects gazed continuously at the eyes of a confederate, who either returned the gaze or looked at a spot on a wall 30° to the right of the subject's head, according to a prearranged program. The subjects' GSR was monitored throughout the period.Both frequency (p < .02) and amplitude (p < .001) of GSR responses were greater when subjects' gazes were reciprocated, (eye contact), than when unreciprocated. There were no main effects of sex.
This study examined whether the linear systems model of infants' visual preferences (Banks & Salapatek, 1981) could predict neonates' preferences, among facelike and abstract patterns. To do so, the study assessed the relative importance of stimulus energy (as measured by the amplitude spectrum) and stimulus structure (as measured by the phase spectrum) in determining early preferences. Forty-eight neonates viewed six pairings of four stimuli: (a) a schematic face, (b) a lattice, (c) a pattern composed of the amplitude spectrum of the lattice and the phase spectrum of the face, and (d) a pattern composed of the amplitude spectrum of the face and the phase spectrum of the lattice. The linear systems model predicted the observed preferences quite accurately. That is, the infants' preferences could be predicted from knowledge of the amplitude spectrum but not the phase spectrum. These results are interpreted as showing that neonates' preferences for facelike patterns are governed primarily by simulus energy and not by the familiarity or social significance of such patterns.
Mutual gaze may be described as a psychological process during which two persons have the feeling of a brief link between their two minds. In the monkey, specific cell assemblies in the superior temporal cortex of the brain are responsive to gaze. This suggests that the brain may have evolved mechanisms for interpreting direct eye contact. These mechanisms could depend on the activation of specific brain regions. Positron emission tomography was used to measure activity in brain regions in healthy volunteers while they were looking at faces featuring, respectively, eye contact, averted gaze, or no gaze. As expected a region known to be involved in face processing was found to be activated in the ventral occipito-temporal region, especially in the right hemisphere. Averted gaze and mutual gaze triggered blood flow responses in similar areas which were different from those involved in face processing. These areas included the occipital part of the fusiform gyrus, the right parietal lobule, the right inferior temporal gyrus, and the middle temporal gyrus in both hemispheres. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that perception of eyes regardless of the direction of the gaze is subserved by a distributed network. However, no conclusive evidence was found for specific area(s) devoted to mutual gaze processing.
Two experiments examined whether infants shift their visual attention in the direction toward which an adult's eyes turn. A computerized modification of previous joint-attention paradigms revealed that infants as young as 3 months attend in the same direction as the eyes of a digitized adult face. This attention shift was indicated by the latency and direction of their orienting to peripheral probes presented after the face was extinguished. A second experiment found a similar influence of direction of perceived gaze, but also that less peripheral orienting occurred if the central face remained visible during presentation of the probe. This may explain why attention shifts triggered by gaze perception have been difficult to observe in infants using previous naturalistic procedures. Our new method reveals both that direction of perceived gaze can be discriminated by young infants and that this perception triggers corresponding shifts of their own attention.
The eye movements of infants, aged 4–5, 7–8, and 10–11 weeks, were recorded while they viewed either a representation of a face or a nonface stimulus. Presentation of the visual stimulus was paired with the presentation of an auditory stimulus (either voice or tone) or silence. Attention to the visual stimulus was greater for the older two groups than for the youngest group. The effect of the addition of sound was to increase attention to the visual stimulus. In general, the face was looked at more than the nonface stimulus. The difference in visual attention between the face and the nonface stimulus did not appear to be based solely on the physical characteristics of the stimuli. A sharp increase in the amount of looking at the eyes of the face stimulus at 7–8 weeks of age seemed to be related to a developing appreciation of the meaning of the face as a pattern.
Visual fixations of 3- to 5-week-old, 7-week-old, and 9- to 11-week-old infants were recorded as they scanned an adult's face which was stationary, moving, or talking. A dramatic increase in face fixations occurred between 5 and 7 weeks for all conditions. Talking produced an intensification of scanning in the eye area in the two older groups.
Forty newborn infants, median age 9 minutes, turned their eyes and heads to follow a series of moving stimuli. Responsiveness was significantly greater to a proper face pattern than to either of two scrambled versions of the same stimulus or to a blank.
The demonstration of such consistent response differences suggests that visual discriminations are being made at this early age. These results imply that organized visual perception ion is an unlearned capacity of the human organism. The preference for the proper face stimulus by infants who had not seen a real face prior to testing suggests that an unlearned or "evolved" responsiveness to faces may be present in human neonates.
Accuracy at perceiving frontal eye gaze was studied in monkeys and human subjects using a forced-choice detection task on paired photographs of a single human face. Monkeys learned the task readily, but after bilateral removal of the banks and floor of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) they failed to perform the task efficiently. This result is consistent with the conclusion, based on recordings from single cells in awake, behaving monkeys [Perret et al., Physiological Aspects of Clinical Neuro-ophthalmology, Chapman & Hall, London, 1988] that this region of the temporal lobe is important for coding information about eye-gaze of a confronting animal. Human subjects were given identical stimuli in a task where they were asked to detect "the face that is looking straight at you". Human performance is sensitive to the degree of angular deviation from the frontal gaze position, being poorest at small angular deviations from 0 degrees. This was also true of monkeys viewing these stimuli, pre- and post-operatively. Compared with normal controls, two humans prosopagnosics were impaired at this task. However the extent of impairment was different in the two patients. These findings are related to earlier reports (including those for patients with right-hemisphere damage without prosopagnosia), to normal performance with upright and inverted face photographs, and to notions of independent subsystems in face processing.
Research on gaze and eye contact was organized within the framework of Patterson's (1982) sequential functional model of nonverbal exchange. Studies were reviewed showing how gaze functions to (a) provide information, (b) regulate interaction, (c) express intimacy, (d) exercise social control, and (e) facilitate service and task goals. Research was also summarized that describes personal, experiential, relational, and situational antecedents of gaze and reactions to gaze. Directions were given for a functional analysis of the relation between gaze and physiological responses. Attribution theories were integrated into the sequential model for making predictions about people's perceptions of their own gazing behavior and the gazing behavior of others. Data on people's accuracy in reporting their own and others' gaze were presented and integrated with related findings in attribution research. The sequential model was used to analyze research studies measuring the interaction between gaze and personal and contextual variables. Methodological and measurement issues were discussed and directions were outlined for future research.
Current approaches to the study of infant pattern vision have yielded interesting findings but have not yielded a set of data or principles from which general predictions can be drawn. We propose an alternative approach based on measurements of the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). This approach has been successfully applied to the study of adult vision. In principle, the approach allows one to predict the detectability of a wide variety of two-dimensional patterns if one knows the observer's CSF. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, CSFs of 1-, 2-, and 3-month infants were measured using a fixation preference paradigm. The results indicated noteworthy development between 1 and 3 months particularly in sensitivity to high spatial frequencies (fine stripes). The low-frequency attenuation characteristic of adult vision is observed at 2 and 3 months but not always at 1. In Experiment 2, CSFs of 2-month infants were measured at a lower luminance level. The results indicated that low-frequency attenuation became less pronounced as would be predicted if it were a manifestation of lateral inhibitory processing. The manner in which the CSF can be used to make general predictions is described. The CSFs of Experiment 1 are then used to successfully predict infants' detection of patterns used in two frequently cited experiments. We also propose a simple model of infant pattern preference and show that the model accurately predicts the results of a number of well-known experiments.
The frequency of lethal mutations occurring in Drosophila melanogaster was reduced by approximately one-half when irradiated males were treated with actinomycin D, which also inhibited the appearance
of melanotic atypical growths in the strain used for the study.
Human infants under 5 days of age consistently looked more at black-and-white patterns than at plain colored surfaces, which
indicates the innate ability to perceive form.
Specific versus non-specific face recognition device Developmental neurocognition: speech and face processing the first year of life
- K A Kleiner
Kleiner, K. A. (1993). Specific versus non-specific face recognition device. In M. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen, P. Jusczyk, P. McNeilage & J. Morton (Eds.), Developmental neurocognition: speech and face processing the first year of life. New York: Academic Press.
Cortical parcellation and the development of face processing Developmental neurocogni-tion: speech and face processing in the first year of life
- M H Johnson
- S Vecera
Johnson, M. H., & Vecera, S. (1993). Cortical parcellation and the development of face processing. In M. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen, P. Jusczyk, P. McNeilage & J. Morton (Eds.), Developmental neurocogni-tion: speech and face processing in the first year of life. New York: Academic Press.
Facial expressions in higher primates. Symposium of the Zoological Society of London
- Van Hooff
Van Hooff, J. (1962). Facial expressions in higher primates. Symposium of the Zoological Society of London, 8, 97–125.
The reactions of 5 month old infants to eye contact of the mother and a stranger Infants' perception of facedness Social perception in infants
- R Lasky
- R Klein
Lasky, R., & Klein, R. (1979). The reactions of 5 month old infants to eye contact of the mother and a stranger (Vol. 25). Quarterly. Maurer, D. (1985). Infants' perception of facedness. In T. Field & M. Fox (Eds.), Social perception in infants. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Mechanisms underlying face preference at birth The development of sensory, motor and cognitive capacities in early infancy: from perception to cognition
- F Simion
- E Valenza
- C Umilta
Simion, F., Valenza, E., & Umilta, C. (1998). Mechanisms underlying face preference at birth. In F. Simion & G. Butterworth (Eds.), The development of sensory, motor and cognitive capacities in early infancy: from perception to cognition.
Infants’ perception of facedness
- Maurer
Maurer, D. (1985). Infants' perception of facedness. In T. Field & M. Fox (Eds.),
Social Perception in Infants,. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Infant pattern vision
- Banks
Gaze and eye contact
- Kleinke
Models of neonates’ preference for facelike patterns
- Kleiner
The state variable in neonatal research
- Ashton