Attentional Prioritization of Infant Faces Is Limited to Own-Race Infants

Background: Recent evidence indicates that infant faces capture attention automatically, presumably to elicit caregiving behavior from adults and leading to greater probability of progeny survival. Elsewhere, evidence demonstrates that people show deficiencies in the processing of other-race relative to own-race faces. We ask whether this other-race effect impacts on attentional attraction to infant faces. Using a dot-probe task to reveal the spatial allocation of attention, we investigate whether other-race infants capture attention. Principal Findings: South Asian and White participants (young adults aged 18–23 years) responded to a probe shape appearing in a location previously occupied by either an infant face or an adult face; across trials, the race (South Asian/ White) of the faces was manipulated. Results indicated that participants were faster to respond to probes that appeared in the same location as infant faces than adult faces, but only on own-race trials. Conclusions/Significance: Own-race infant faces attract attention, but other-race infant faces do not. Sensitivity to facespecific care-seeking cues in other-race kindenschema may be constrained by interracial contact and experience

Trial sequence for probe detection task (White infant–adult face pairing and South Asian infant–adult pairing).

<p>Trial sequence for probe detection task (White infant–adult face pairing and South Asian infant–adult pairing).</p

Mean pleasantness and arousal ratings (±1 standard error) as a function of target age, target race, and participant race in the pilot study; possible range = 0 to 100.

<p><i>Note.</i> The <i>P</i> value refers to a <i>t</i>-test comparing the infant and adult faces per column condition (e.g., comparing ratings of South Asian adult and infant faces by South Asian participants).</p

Performance on probe detection task.

<p>Difference RTs for probes appearing behind adult faces minus probes appearing behind infant faces, as a function of stimuli and participant race. <i>Note.</i> Higher numbers indicate greater attentional allocation to infant over adult faces. Error bars represent ± 1S.E.</p

Mean probe-detection reaction times (±1 standard error) in milliseconds as a function of distractor age, distractor race, and participant race; experimental study (64 trials per condition).

<p>Mean probe-detection reaction times (±1 standard error) in milliseconds as a function of distractor age, distractor race, and participant race; experimental study (64 trials per condition).</p

Mean probe-detection error rates (±1 standard error) as a function of distractor age, distractor race, and participant race; experimental study (64 trials per condition).

<p>Mean probe-detection error rates (±1 standard error) as a function of distractor age, distractor race, and participant race; experimental study (64 trials per condition).</p

Emotional capture by fearful expressions varies with psychopathic traits

Task-irrelevant emotional expressions are known to capture attention, with the extent of “emotional capture” varying with psychopathic traits in antisocial samples. We investigated whether this variation extends throughout the continuum of psychopathic traits (and co-occurring trait anxiety) in a community sample. Participants (N = 85) searched for a target face among facial distractors. As predicted, angry and fearful faces interfered with search, indicated by slower reaction times relative to neutral faces. When fear appeared as either target or distractor, diminished emotional capture was seen with increasing affective-interpersonal psychopathic traits. However, moderation analyses revealed that this was only when lifestyle-antisocial psychopathic traits were low, consistent with evidence suggesting that these two facets of psychopathic traits display opposing relationships with emotional reactivity. Anxiety did not show the predicted relationships with emotional capture effects. Findings show that normative variation in high-level individual differences in psychopathic traits influence automatic bias to emotional stimuli

Examples of stimuli used in task (not to scale).

<p>This example shows adolescent stimuli with an emotional non-target face present.</p

Mean RT for each experimental condition as a function of stimulus type.

<p>Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.</p