Abstract
The purpose of the study was to explore visual scanning behavior of expressive faces in 4- and 8-month-old infants. Unfants were presented with expressive photographs (happy, angry, disgusted, fearful and sad) of the female and male faces. Eye-movements were recorded and transformed to match a prototypical face, so that to finely allow seeing which facial parts were focused according to trials and facial expressions. The results indicated that infants paid attention to different facial parts according to the emotions expressed by the faces, the features associated with facial actions during emotion expression being more specifically focused. Furthermore, the temporal course of the visual exploration indicated that, after a common pattern with fixations the center of the faces, the sequence of the exploration of the different facial features varied according to the expressions. The implications for the study of the development of facial emotion understanding in infancy are discussed.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012