Category Archives: Research

It’s my pleasure to inform you that our latest paper, “Higher attention bias for fear at 8 months of age is associated with better socioemotional competencies during toddlerhood”, is out in Infant Behavior and Development. In this paper, we were interested in the association between the individual variance in attention bias for faces and, specifically, fearful faces during infancy and socioemotional problems and competencies during toddlerhood. We explored attentional face and fear biases at the age of 8 months using eye tracking and the face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy and fearful faces and a scrambled-face control stimulus. Socioemotional problems and competencies were reported by parents with the Brief Infant and Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) when children were 24 months old. A higher attentional fear bias at 8 months of age was related to higher levels of socioemotional competence at 24 months of age, when infants’ sex and temperamental affectivity, maternal age, education and depressive symptoms were controlled. We found no significant association between attentional face or fear bias and socioemotional problems. To conclude, heightened attention bias for fearful faces was related to positive outcomes in early socioemotional development. Longitudinal study designs are needed to explore the changes in the relation between the attention bias for fear or threat and socioemotional development during early childhood.

Eskola, E., Kataja, E.-L., Hyönä, J., Nolvi, S., Häikiö, T., Carter, A. S., Karlsson, H., Karlsson, L., & Korja, R. (In press). Higher attention bias for fear at 8 months of age is associated with better socioemotional competencies during toddlerhood. Infant Behavior and Development. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2023.101838

It’s my pleasure to inform you that our latest paper, “Kielen natiivihallinnan variaatio ja sosiolingvistinen meneillään olevan kielenmuutoksen tutkimus” [Young adults’ language proficiency and on-going language change], is out in Virittäjä (in Finnish). In this paper, we examined the language proficiency of young adults with focus on derivational morphology. The data consisted of a university entrance exam testing various aspects of linguistic knowledge, e.g., a derivation test in which impossible, possible and occurring derivations were recognized. The scores of the matriculation examination predicted the subjects’ success in recognizing possible derivations with statistical significance. Qualitative examination of different derivation types revealed clear variation and different recognition strategies between subjects. As language proficiency varies, it can affect the results of studies into on-going language change. If language proficiency is not sufficiently taken into account, developmental and proficiency-related factors could be mistakenly read as change on a societal level.

Laasanen, M., Pajunen, A., & Häikiö, T. (2022). Kielen natiivihallinnan variaatio ja sosiolingvistinen meneillään olevan kielenmuutoksen tutkimus. Virittäjä, 126(3). doi:10.23982/vir.83371

It’s my pleasure to inform you that our latest paper, “Individual differences in pupil dilation to others’ emotional and neutral eyes with varying pupil sizes”, is out in Cognition and Emotion. In this paper, we examined the pupil size of adult participants while they viewed images of the eye region of individuals varying in emotional expression (neutral, happy, sad, fearful, angry) and pupil size (large, medium, small). Participants showed pupillary contagion regardless of the emotional expression. Individual differences in demographics (gender, age, socioeconomic status) and psychosocial factors (anxiety, depression, sleep problems) were also examined, yet the only factor related to pupillary contagion was socioeconomic status, with higher socioeconomic status predicting less pupillary contagion for emotionally-neutral stimuli. The results suggest that while pupillary contagion is a robust phenomenon, it can vary meaningfully across individuals.

Fawcett, C., Nordenswan, E., Yrttiaho, S., Häikiö, T., Korja, R., Karlsson, L., Karlsson, H., & Kataja, E-L. (2022). Individual differences in pupil dilation to others’ emotional and neutral eyes with varying pupil sizes. Cognition and Emotion. doi:10.1080/02699931.2022.2073973

It’s my pleasure to tell that our latest paper “Sound symbolic potential of Russian onomatopoeias: Evidence from eye-tracking” is available online. In this paper, we investigated whether native Finnish speakers can grasp the meaning of Russian onomatopoeic words without any prior knowledge of the Russian language. In Experiment 1, elicitation test, naïve listeners generated associations for the acoustic events depicted by onomatopoeic words they heard. A cluster analysis suggested presence of different types of cues that affect the elicitation of associations. We labeled the clusters Facilitating, Counteracting, Mixed, and Undefined on basis of the types of the associations. In Experiment 2, the same stimulus words were used in an eye-tracking experiment using visual world paradigm. It was shown that the participants have even better chances to map the onomatopoeic words to the correct semantic domain when extralinguistic information is available, in this case target images presented on the experimental display. The availability of both audio and visual inputs substantially boosted this process in all four clusters. Our findings support the view that imitative sound symbolism offers a scaffolding material for connecting onomatopoeias to their referents when words are pronounced in isolation.

Kanerva, O & Häikiö, T. (2022). Sound symbolic potential of Russian onomatopoeias: Evidence from eye-tracking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. doi:10.1037/xlm0001114

It’s my pleasure to tell that our latest paper “Eye movements of children and adults reading in three different orthographies” is available online. In this paper, we compared the eye movement patters of children and adults in three languages, namely English, German, and Finnish. We showed that English children showed a qualitatively different reading pattern, while German and Finnish children’s reading behavior was rather similar. These results indicate that the predictability of an orthographic system is more important than its complexity for children’s reading development. Adults’ reading behavior, in contrast, was remarkably similar across languages. Our results demonstrate that eye movements are sensitive to language-specific features in children’s reading, but become more homogenous as reading
skill matures.

Schroeder, S., Häikiö, T., Pagán, A., Dickins, J. H., Hyönä, J., & Liversedge, S. P. (2021). Eye movements of children and adults reading in three different orthographies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. doi:10.1037/xlm0001099

It’s my pleasure to tell that our latest paper “Eye Movements during dynamic scene viewing are affected by visual attention skills and events of the scene: Evidence from first-person shooter gameplay videos” is available online, free to download. In this paper, we showed that individual differences in visual attention tasks were associated with eye movement patterns observed during viewing of the gameplay video.

Holm, S. K., Häikiö, T., Olli, K., & Kaakinen, J. K. (2021). Eye movements during dynamic scene viewing are affected by visual attention skills and events of the scene: Evidence from first-person shooter gameplay videos. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 14(2). doi:10.16910/jemr.14.2.3

It’s my pleasure to tell that our latest paper “Prenatal glucocorticoid-exposed infants do not show an age-typical fear bias at 8 months of age – Preliminary findings from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study” is available online, free to download. In this paper, we showed that infants exposed to Synthetic glucocorticoids (sGC) during pregnacy did not exhibit age-typical fear bias at 8 months of age.

Kataja, E-L., Rodrigues, A. J., Scheinin, N. M., Nolvi, S., Korja, R., Häikiö, T., Ekholm, E., Sousa, N., Karlsson, L., & Karlsson, H. (2021). Prenatal glucocorticoid-exposed infants do not show an age-typical fear bias at 8 months of age – Preliminary findings from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. Frontiers in Psychology, section Developmental Psychology, 12:655654. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.655654