Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 52, Issue 11, Pages 1705-1720Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/dev0000157
Keywords
infant attention development; faces and voices; faces versus objects; audiovisual and visual stimulation; selective attention
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R01 HD053776, R03 HD052602, K02 HD064943]
- National Institutes of Mental Health [R01 MH062226]
- National Science Foundation [SLC SBE0350201]
- National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences [R25 GM061347]
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The development of attention to dynamic faces versus objects providing synchronous audiovisual versus silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically assessed when, if, or how attention to speaking faces emerges and changes across infancy. Two measures of attention maintenance, habituation time (HT) and look-away rate (LAR), were derived from cross-sectional data of 2-to 8-month-old infants (N = 801). Results indicated that attention to audiovisual faces and voices was maintained across age, whereas attention to each of the other event types (audiovisual objects, silent dynamic faces, silent dynamic objects) declined across age. This reveals a gradually emerging advantage in attention maintenance (longer HTs, lower LARs) for audiovisual speaking faces compared with the other 3 event types. At 2 months, infants showed no attentional advantage for faces (with greater attention to audiovisual than to visual events); at 3 months, they attended more to dynamic faces than objects (in the presence or absence of voices), and by 4 to 5 and 6 to 8 months, significantly greater attention emerged to temporally coordinated faces and voices of people speaking compared with all other event types. Our results indicate that selective attention to coordinated faces and voices over other event types emerges gradually across infancy, likely as a function of experience with multimodal, redundant stimulation from person and object events.
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