Developmental changes in orienting towards faces: A behavioral and eye-tracking study
Developmental changes in orienting towards faces: A behavioral and eye-tracking study
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DOI：
10.1177/0165025419844031
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发表时间：
2020-03-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Nakamura，Miho
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hirai，Masahiro;Muramatsu，Yukako;Nakamura，Miho
此前的研究表明，新生儿和成年人的注意力更多地集中在人脸上。然而，面孔刺激捕捉到的视觉注意的发展变化仍然不清楚，特别是当涉及到一个明确的自上而下的过程时。我们利用视觉搜索范式来评估非目标面部刺激捕获的视觉注意的相对强度和对目标刺激的显性注意控制是如何随着搜索的进行而演变的，以及这个过程在发展过程中是如何变化的。90名5-14岁的儿童在一系列干扰物中寻找目标，这些干扰物偶尔会有一张直立的脸。为了评估发育变化的准确图像，我们测量了：(1)手动反应，如反应时间和准确性；(2)眼动，如第一次注视的位置，反映了最初阶段的注意轮廓，以及注视时间，反映了搜索后期的注意轮廓。反应时间和准确度都受到与目标无关的脸的存在的影响，尽管干扰效应在不同年龄之间是一致的。然而，第一个注视比例反映了发育变化，这表明在6.9岁之前，最初的注意力优先指向与目标无关的面孔。此外，在12.8岁之前，对面部刺激的第一次注视明显比对物体刺激的注视更频繁。相比之下，面部刺激的注视时间比例在所有年龄段都显著高于物体刺激。这些发现表明，发育变化不会影响试验的后期搜索周期，但会影响第一次注视所索引的初始定向。此外，手动反应与眼动行为密切相关。
Previous studies show that newborn infants and adults orient their attention preferentially toward human faces. However, the developmental changes of visual attention captured by face stimuli remain unclear, especially when an explicit top-down process is involved. We capitalized on a visual search paradigm to assess how the relative strength of visual attention captured by a non-target face stimulus and explicit attentional control on a target stimulus evolve as search progresses and how this process changes during development. Ninety children aged 5–14 years searched for a target within an array of distractors, which occasionally contained an upright face. To assess the precise picture of developmental changes, we measured: (1) manual responses, such as reaction time and accuracy; and (2) eye movements such as the location of the first fixation, which reflect the attentional profile at the initial stage, and looking times, which reflect the attentional profile at the later period of searching. Both reaction time and accuracy were affected by the presence of the target-unrelated face, though the interference effect was observed consistently across ages. However, developmental changes were captured by the first fixation proportion, suggesting that initial attention was preferentially directed towards the target-unrelated face before 6.9 years of age. Furthermore, prior to 12.8 years of age, the first fixation towards face stimuli was significantly more frequent than for object stimuli. In contrast, the looking time proportion for the face stimuli was significantly higher than that for the objects across all ages. These findings suggest that developmental changes do not influence the later search periods during a trial, but that they influence the initial orienting indexed by the first fixation. Moreover, the manual responses are tightly linked to eye movement behaviors.