Using Eye Tracking to Understand Infants' Attentional Bias for Faces

Abstract

Infants have a natural tendency to look at adults' faces, possibly to help initiate vital interactions with caregivers during sensitive periods of development. Recent studies using eye-tracking technologies have identified the mechanisms that underlie infants' capacity to orient and hold attention on faces. These studies have shown that the bias for faces is weak in young infants, but becomes more robust and resistant to distraction during the second half of the 1st year. This development is apparently related to more general changes in infants' attention and control of eye movement. As a tractable and reproducible aspect of infant behavior, the attention bias for faces can be used to examine the neural correlates of attention and may be a way to monitor early neurodevelopment in infants.