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Are faces too salient to benefit from attentional facilitation in infancy?

par Bourgaux, Laura ;Quek, Genevieve G.L.;De Heering, Adélaïde
Référence 2025 Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS) (26-27/05/2025: Brussels, Belgium)
Publication Non publié, 2025-05-26

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Résumé :

Faces hold a unique status in human perception, capturing attention from infancy (Gliga et al., 2009; Reynolds & Roth, 2018). Recent work also demonstrated distinct attentional modulations for faces and non-face categories in adults using a frequency-tagging paradigm combined with electroencephalography (Quek & de Heering, 2024). The present study adapts this paradigm to 6- to 9-month-old infants to investigate whether similar patterns of face-selective attention exist early in life. To this end, infants will view rapid streams of images flickering at the frequency of 6 Hz, with faces and birds interlaced at 1.2 Hz (1 out of 5 images) and 1.5 Hz (1 out of 4 images), respectively. Crucially, either human voices or bird vocalizations will be presented non-periodically throughout each trial to test how different auditory cues modulate infants’ attentional dynamics toward distinct visual categories including highly salient stimuli such as faces. Given that infants’ face categorization is less robust than in adults (de Heering & Rossion, 2015), we hypothesize that the face-selective response will be facilitated by human voices. Alternatively, this response may remain unaffected, reflecting a ceiling effect due to the natural saliency of faces, as observed in adults. Overall, this work will shed light on the role of attentional dynamics early in life and provide broader insights into the visual processing of faces and of less salient categories such as birds.