It’s my pleasure to inform you that our latest paper, “The stability of early developing attentional bias for faces and fear from 8 to 30 and 60 months in the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study”, is out in Developmental Psychology. In this paper, we examined the attention disengagement patterns from faces at 8, 30, and 60 months of age. At group level, disengagement probabilities followed a nonlinear longitudinal trajectory in all face conditions (neutral, fearful, happy), being lowest at 8 months, highest at 30 months, and intermediate at 60 months. Face bias declined between 8 and 30 months, but did not change between 30 and 60 months. Fear bias declined linearly from 8 to 60 months. The results suggest that prioritized attention to faces-that is, a hallmark of infant cognition and a key aspect of human social behavior-follows a nonlinear trajectory in early childhood and may have only weak continuity from infancy to mid childhood.
Kataja E-L., Eskola, E., Pelto, J., Paija, S-P., Nolvi, S., Häikiö, T., Karlsson, L., Karlsson, H., & Leppänen, J. M. (2022). The stability of early-developing attentional bias for faces and fear from 8 to 30 and 60 months. Developmental Psychology. doi:10.1037/dev0001432
Tuomo Häikiö 