We investigated whether adults have attentional bias toward infant faces, whether it is moderated by infant facial expression, and the predictive effect of the adult attachment state on it. One hundred unmarried nulliparous college students [50 men and 50 women; aged 17–24 years ] were recruited. Each completed a self-report questionnaire—the Chinese version of the State Adult Attachment Measure, and a dot-probe task with a stimulus presentation duration of 500 ms, which used 192 black-and-white photographs of 64 (...) people as the experimental stimuli. The results showed that, at the duration of 500 ms, individuals' attentional bias toward infant faces disappeared, regardless of the facial expression. However, when the interaction between avoidant attachment state and face was controlled, the attentional bias was significant again, and the avoidant attachment state negatively predicted individuals' attentional bias toward infant faces. This indicates that at the suprathreshold stage, there are individual differences in the attentional bias toward infant faces, and high avoidant attachment will weaken individuals' attentional bias toward infant faces. This study advances previous studies that focused only on individuals' attention to infant faces occurring at the early processing stage of attention. The results provide direction for interventions; specifically, changing the attachment state of avoidant individuals can affect their attention to infants, which may promote the establishment of parent–child relationships. (shrink)

Research interest in cuteness perception and its effects on subsequent behavior and physiological responses has recently been increasing. The purpose of the present study was to produce a dataset of Japanese infant faces that are free of portrait rights and can be used for cuteness research. A total of 80 original facial images of 6-month-old infants were collected from their parents. The cuteness level of each picture was rated on a 7-point scale by 200 Japanese people. Prototypical high- (...) and low-cuteness faces were created by averaging the top 10 and bottom 10 faces according to the mean cuteness ratings. Then, 50 composite faces were made by mixing two faces randomly chosen from the 60 unused middle-cuteness faces. The normative cuteness ratings of these composite faces were obtained from 229 Japanese men and women in their 20s–60s. The shape of each composite face was transformed to be cuter or less cute along a continuum between the high- and low-cuteness prototypical faces. A two-alternative forced-choice task confirmed that cuteness discrimination was better than the chance level for all 50 face pairs. Moreover, the results showed that young men had poorer sensitivity to cuteness differences in infant faces than older men and women of any age. This Japanese Cute Infant Face dataset, including composite face images and normative rating scores, is publicly available online. (shrink)

Experiments on intertemporal consumption typically show that people have difficulties in optimally solving such problems. Previous studies have focused on contexts in which agents are faced with risky future incomes and have to plan over long horizons. We present an experiment comparing decision making under certainty, risk, and ambiguity, over a shorter lifecycle. Results show that behavior in the ambiguity treatment is markedly different than in the risk condition and it is characterized by a significant pattern of under-consumption.

Infants acquire their first words through interactions with social partners. In the first year of life, infants receive a high frequency of visual and auditory input from faces, making faces a potential strong social cue in facilitating word-to-world mappings. In this position paper, we review how and when infant gaze to faces is likely to support their subsequent vocabulary outcomes. We assess the relevance of infant gaze to faces selectively, in three domains: infant (...) gaze to different features within a face ; then to faces ; and finally to more socially relevant types of faces. We argue that infant gaze to faces could scaffold vocabulary construction, but its relevance may be impacted by the developmental level of the infant and the type of task with which they are presented. Gaze to faces proves relevant to vocabulary, as gazes to eyes could inform about the communicative nature of the situation or about the labeled object, while gazes to the mouth could improve word processing, all of which are key cues to highlighting word-to-world pairings. We also discover gaps in the literature regarding how infants’ gazes to faces or to different types of faces relate to vocabulary outcomes. An important direction for future research will be to fill these gaps to better understand the social factors that influence infant vocabulary outcomes. (shrink)

As a result of evolution, human babies are born with outstanding abilities for human communication and cooperation. The other side of the coin is their great sensitivity to any clear and durable violation in their relationship with caregivers. Infant sustained social withdrawal behavior was first described in infants who had been separated from their caregivers, as in Spitz's description of “hospitalism” and “anaclitic depression.” Later, ISSWB was pointed to as a major clinical psychological feature in failure-to-thrive infants. Fraiberg also (...) described freezing behavior as one of the earliest modes of infant defense in the face of adverse situations threatening the infant's ability to synchronize with caregivers. We hypothesize that ISSWB behaviors are associated with poor vagal brake functioning and that an impaired social engagement system is induced by an impoverished and/or dangerous environment. Recent research using animal models highlight the neurobiology and the genetics of the social Approach/Withdrawal Behavior in infants. The present paper is therefore a plea for social withdrawal behavior to be attributed a more important role as a major psychological defensive mechanism in infancy, and for research into early development and early intervention to make more practical and theoretical use of this concept, thus decreasing the challenge of translation in social neurosciences. This work presents several situations involving developmental hazards in which assessment of ISSWB by means of the Alarm Distress Baby Scale has proven useful, i.e., malnutrition, effects of major maternal depression and or traumatization, assessing social withdrawal in infants with an chronic organic illness or assessing ISSWB in out of home placed infants during parental visitation. Relationships between ISSWB and other biophysiological behavioral systems are discussed, particularly links with attachment processes and Porges's polyvagal theory. (shrink)

In honoring Carroll Izard’s contributions to emotion research, we discuss infant facial activity and emotion expression. We consider the debated issue of whether infants are biologically prepared to express specific emotions. We offer a perspective that potentially integrates differing viewpoints on infant facial expression of emotion. Specifically, we suggest that evolution has prepared infants with innate action readiness patterns, which are crucial for early infant–caregiver social interaction, and in the course of social interaction specific facial configurations acquire (...) functional significance, becoming associated with specific emotions. Research has not confirmed the presence of innate neurophysiological action patterns that map onto discrete emotions but evidence indicates that the possibility has not been ruled out. (shrink)

Human faces are among the most important visual stimuli that we encounter at all ages. This importance partly stems from the face as a conveyer of information on the emotional state of other individuals. Previous research has demonstrated specific scanning patterns in response to threat-related compared to non-threat-related emotional expressions. This study investigated how visual scanning patterns toward faces which display different emotional expressions develop during infancy. The visual scanning patterns of 4-month-old and 7-month-old infants and adults when (...) looking at threat-related (i.e., angry and fearful) versus non-threat-related (i.e., happy, sad, and neutral) emotional faces were examined. We found that infants as well as adults displayed an avoidant looking pattern in response to threat-related emotional expressions with reduced dwell times and relatively less fixations to the inner features of the face. In addition, adults showed a pattern of eye contact avoidance when looking at threat-related emotional expressions that was not yet present in infants. Thus, whereas a general avoidant reaction to threat-related facial expressions appears to be present from very early in life, the avoidance of eye contact might be a learned response toward others' anger and fear that emerges later during development. (shrink)

Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development or do they require many years to develop? Prior evidence leaves this question unresolved. We designed a new 32-channel infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coil and collected high-quality functional MRI (...) (fMRI) data from infants (2–9 months of age) while they viewed stimuli from four conditions—faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. We find that infants have face-, scene-, and body-selective responses in the location of the adult FFA, PPA, and EBA, respectively, powerfully constraining accounts of cortical development. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Mothers on Baby Beauty Good Mom, Bad Critic? Beauty, Love, and Prejudice Notes.

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 of upright and inverted faces. The (...) results showed that 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 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. (shrink)

Grossmann's argument for the “fearful ape hypothesis” rests on an incomplete review of infant responses to emotional faces. An alternate interpretation of the literature argues the opposite, that an early preference for happy faces predicts cooperative learning. Questions remain as to whether infants can interpret affect from faces, limiting the conclusion that any “fear bias” means the infant is fearful.

The orphans of Romania were participants in what is sometimes called “the forbidden experiment”: depriving human infants of intimacy, affection, and human contact is an inhuman practice. It is an experiment which no ethical researcher would set out to do. This paper examines historical data, case histories, and research findings which deal with early deprivation and performs a phenomenological analysis of deprivation phenomena as they impact emotional and physical development. A key element of deprivation is the absence of intimate relationships (...) with other human beings. However, the absence of intimacy impacts not only the social/emotional abilities of infants, but their very ability to perceive the world. Philosophically and from a radically Merleau-Pontean perspective, the intimate face of the other appears to be a world opening event for the child. Its absence has a profound impact on the child’s experience of embodiment, coexistence, spatiality, temporality, and language. When seen through early deprivation, intimacy appears as a necessary foundation for establishing the transcendence of the world beyond perceptual presence, and it provides the possibility for language, culture, and history. (shrink)

Trivers’s theory of parental investment suggests that adults should decide whether or not to invest in a given infant using a cost-benefit analysis. To make the best investment decision, adults should seek as much relevant information as possible. Infant facial cues may serve to provide information and evoke feelings of parental care in adults. Four specific infant facial cues were investigated: resemblance (as a proxy for kinship), health, happiness, and cuteness. It was predicted that these cues would (...) influence feelings of parental care for both sexes, but that resemblance would be more important for men than women because of the importance of paternity uncertainty in the ancestral environment. Seventy-six men and 76 women participated in a hypothetical adoption task in which they made judgments of infant faces. Average zero-order, partial, and component score correlations all revealed that men placed primary emphasis on cues of resemblance, while women placed primary emphasis on cues of health and cuteness (cues of infant quality). The correlations also showed that men placed a significantly greater emphasis on cues of resemblance than did women. (shrink)

The debate over how to best guide HIV-infected mothers in resource-poor settings on infant feeding is more than two decades old. Globally, breastfeeding is responsible for approximately 300,000 HIV infections per year, while at the same time, UNICEF estimates that not breastfeeding (formula feeding with contaminated water) is responsible for 1.5 million child deaths per year. The largest burden of these infections and deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using this region as an example of the burden faced more generally (...) in other resource-poor settings, we contrast the evolution of the clinical standard of care for infant feeding with HIV-infected mothers in high-income countries to the current international clinical guidelines for HIV-infected mothers and infant feeding in resource-poor settings. While the international guidelines of exclusive breastfeeding for a 6-month period seem to offer the least-worst strategy for reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV during infancy while conferring some immunity through breastfeeding post-6 months, we argue that the impact of the policy on mothers and healthcare workers on the ground is not well understood. The harm reduction approach on the level of health policy translates into a complicated, painful moral dilemma for HIV-positive mothers and those offering them guidance on infant feeding. We argue that the underlying socio-economic disparities that continue to fuel the need for a harm reduction policy on infant feeding and the harm to women and children justify: (1) that higher priority be given to solving the infant feeding dilemma with improved data on safe feeding alternatives, and (2) support of innovative, community-driven solutions that address the particular economic and cultural challenges that continue to result in HIV-transmission to children within these communities. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated innovations in data collection protocols, including use of virtual or remote visits. Although developmental scientists used virtual visits prior to COVID-19, validation of virtual assessments of infant socioemotional and language development are lacking. We aimed to fill this gap by validating a virtual visit protocol that assesses mother and infant behavior during the Still Face Paradigm and infant receptive and expressive communication using the Bayley-III Screening Test. Validation was accomplished through comparisons of (...) data collected during in-person laboratory visits and virtual visits conducted via Zoom. Of the 119 mother-infant dyads who participated, 73 participated in lab visits only, 13 participated in virtual visits only, and 33 dyads participated in a combination of lab and virtual visits across four time points. Maternal perspectives of, and preferences for, virtual visits were also assessed. Proportions of missing data were higher during virtual visits, particularly for assessments of infant receptive communication. Nonetheless, comparisons of virtual and laboratory visits within a given time point indicated that mothers and infants showed similar proportions of facial expressions, vocalizations and directions of gaze during the SFP and infants showed similar and expected patterns of behavioral change across SFP episodes. Infants also demonstrated comparable expressive and receptive communicative abilities across virtual and laboratory assessments. Maternal reports of ease and preference for virtual visits varied by infant age, with mothers of 12-month-old infants reporting, on average, less ease of virtual visits and a preference for in-person visits. Results are discussed in terms of feasibility and validity of virtual visits for assessing infant socioemotional and language development, and broader advantages and disadvantages of virtual visits are also considered. (shrink)

Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. (...) The major finding from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences. (shrink)

The cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s led researchers to view the human mind--like a computer--as an information-processing system that encodes, represents, and stores information and is constrained by limits on hardware and software. The emergence of new behavioral, computational, and neuroscience methodologies, has deeply expanded psychologists' understanding of the workings of the infant, child, and adult mind. One result is that research has focused on mechanisms of change, over developmental time, in the information-processing mind.In this book, Lisa (...) Oakes, Cara Cashon, Marianella Casasola, and David Rakison bring together the recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of the information-processing mind, and provide insight into the future directions in the study of infant perception and cognition. The contributors represent a wide-range of research areas in the study of infant perception and cognition, who emphasize the use of diverse methodological techniques to address key questions about development. Their chapters demonstrate how the combination of historical perspectives on the information-processing approach to cognition and recent advances in behavioral, computational, and neuroscience approaches to cognition has contributed to our understanding of how abilities ranging from visual attention to face processing to object categorization have developed during infancy. Across this broad range of topics, it is clear that much of our modern understanding of infant perceptual and cognitive development emerges from the foundation of classic information-processing models of development, such as that of Leslie B. Cohen. The recent advances illustrated in this book show how researchers have built on this foundation to uncover the mechanisms that drive developmental change. (shrink)

This research performed four experiments to investigate the influence of infant schema cues on charitable donation intention and examine the moderating effect of gender. The results indicate that: individuals stimulated by infant schema cues had a higher willingness to donate when facing charity promotion; the main effect was not due to the perceived cuteness of character in posters; empathy played an entirely mediating role in the relationship between infant schema cues and donation intention; gender moderated the influence (...) of infant schema on donation intention: infant schema cues are effective for improving females’ donation intention, but ineffective for males. These findings contributed to the literature on infant schema and provide practical significance for introducing infant schema in charity promotion. (shrink)

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants’ capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter’s hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence that infants learned and remembered the mapping of objects and their motions. In further experiments, infants learned the mapping for different animals and retained it over a 15-min delay, (...) providing evidence that the learning is robust and infants’ expectations about self-propelled motion are enduring. Further experiments suggested that infants’ learning was less reliable when the self-propelled objects were novel or lacked faces, body parts, and articulated, biological motion. The findings are discussed in relation to infants’ developing knowledge of object categories and capacity to learn about objects in the first year of life. (shrink)

The present study examined early social game routines during natural face-to-face mother–infant interactions and their relationship with oxytocin. Forty-three mother–infant dyads were observed, when infants were 4 months old, during a procedure involving a baseline and a natural interaction, where mothers were instructed to interact with their infants as they would at home. During this procedure four saliva samples from mothers and infants were collected to determine levels of oxytocin at different time points. Social game routines and (...) class='Hi'>infant social engagement (gaze, positive, and negative affect) were coded during the natural interaction. Social games were observed in 76.7% of the mother–infant dyads, and 46 different types of games were identified. Mothers initiated games to re-engage infants significantly more often than when infants were already engaged with them. During the games, infants showed more positive affect and less negative affect in comparison to the rest of the interaction. Finally, maternal increase in oxytocin from before to after the natural interaction was positively correlated with game rate and time spent in games, while infant increase in oxytocin from before to after the natural interaction was inversely related to game rate. These results indicate that social games are an inherent part of early mother–infant interactions, and their occurrence is associated with oxytocin of both infants and mothers. (shrink)

The mismatch between the demand for, and supply of, health products has led to the increasing involvement of courts worldwide in health promotion and marketing. This study critically examines the implementation of one country’s Milk Code within the framework of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes, and the efficacy of the judicial process in balancing corporate marketing and state regulatory objectives. Drawing upon the Philippine experience with its own Milk Code, it evaluates the capacities of courts to determine (...) policy costs and risks against the benefits of delineating and containing corporate marketing strategies for milk substitutes and supplements. The study finds that the methodological and information-based challenges faced by courts in resolving multi-dimensional health issues may not be overcome without serious questions concerning the legitimacy of the judicial process itself. Despite the deficiencies of litigation and adjudication, the study notes the catalytic potential of a judicial decision in opening up vital policy space for future renegotiations among rival parties and interests. Third-party intervention is explored relative to this catalytic function. (shrink)

This study examined whether 8-month-old infants’ hemodynamic responses in the temporal region were modulated by repeated presentation of “Peekaboo” by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Previous studies have shown that infants’ temporal region responds to faces. A recent electroencephalography study showed that the neural activity of infants was modulated by repeated presentation of “Peekaboo.” Some fNIRS studies also revealed that the movie of “Peekaboo” activated the hemodynamic response of the temporal region in infancy. However, no studies have shown the hemodynamic (...) modulation of the temporal region according to the repeated presentation of “Peekaboo” in infants. In order to examine whether the hemodynamic responses of the temporal region were modulated by repeated presentation of “Peekaboo,” we compared the activity of the temporal region between the early and late trials. We set long and short delays before face-presentation. The results showed that the concentration of oxy-hemoglobin in the right occipitotemporal region in both conditions increased after the presentation of “Peekaboo” relative to the baseline. Moreover, in the long delay condition, the hemodynamic modulation of the right occipitotemporal region was induced according to the repeated presentation of “Peekaboo” in infants. (shrink)

Intersexual infants and infants with other genital abnormalities often receive genital surgery for sex assignment or for normalizing purposes. The wisdom and beneficence of these practices have been questioned by intersexual individuals, support groups, some doctors, and the media. Because the practices have been developed without long-term studies to evaluate them, pediatric urologists and parents of such children must face decisions with very little guidance from empirical support. In the face of ignorance about what is really the best medical response (...) to intersexuality or genital abnormalities, some have argued for a moratorium on infant genital surgery until empirical studies are available. The urgent need for retrospective studies is now being recognized in medical journals. Because genital surgery may be appropriate and beneficent in some of these conditions, or in some degrees of these conditions, but not in others, retrospective studies must be devised to examine the degree of success of surgery for each of these conditions, or levels thereof. (shrink)

Human infants are born ready to respond to affiliative signals of a caretaker's face, body, and voice. This ritualized behavior in ancestral mothers and infants was an adaptation that gave rise to music and dance as exaptations for promoting group ritual and other social bonding behaviors, arguing for an evolutionary relationship between mother and infant bonding and both music and dance.

Infants possess only rudimentary face-processing skills, evidence from patients treated for congenital cataract and from monkeys deprived of face input for several months postnatally indicates that this early experience plays a key role in the ultimate development of expert face processing. This article provides evidence that early visual deprivation disrupts some but not all aspects of face processing and that the deficits caused by early visual deprivation are face-specific, but that it is visual deprivation rather than the lack of input (...) from faces per se that causes the deficits to occur. The evidence is placed from visually deprived monkeys and humans into a broader context showing the role of biased experience on the development of expert face processing. (shrink)

Human faces are one of the most prominent stimuli in the visual environment of young infants and convey critical information for the development of social cognition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask wearing has become a common practice outside the home environment. With masks covering nose and mouth regions, the facial cues available to the infant are impoverished. The impact of these changes on development is unknown but is critical to debates around mask mandates in early childhood settings. As (...) infants grow, they increasingly interact with a broader range of familiar and unfamiliar people outside the home; in these settings, mask wearing could possibly influence social development. In order to generate hypotheses about the effects of mask wearing on infant social development, in the present work, we systematically review N = 129 studies selected based on the most recent PRISMA guidelines providing a state-of-the-art framework of behavioral studies investigating face processing in early infancy. We focused on identifying sensitive periods during which being exposed to specific facial features or to the entire face configuration has been found to be important for the development of perceptive and socio-communicative skills. For perceptive skills, infants gradually learn to analyze the eyes or the gaze direction within the context of the entire face configuration. This contributes to identity recognition as well as emotional expression discrimination. For socio-communicative skills, direct gaze and emotional facial expressions are crucial for attention engagement while eye-gaze cuing is important for joint attention. Moreover, attention to the mouth is particularly relevant for speech learning. We discuss possible implications of the exposure to masked faces for developmental needs and functions. Providing groundwork for further research, we encourage the investigation of the consequences of mask wearing for infants’ perceptive and socio-communicative development, suggesting new directions within the research field. (shrink)