ERIC Number: EJ1367159
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Feb
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0012-1649
EISSN: EISSN-1939-0599
Caregiver Faces Capture 6- to 10-Year-Old Children's Attention during an Online Visual Search Task
Hunter, Brianna K.; Markant, Julie
Developmental Psychology, v59 n2 p344-352 Feb 2023
Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli, it is unclear whether specific types of faces capture attention to a greater extent than others. Caregiver faces are one of the most prevalent and socially motivating stimuli in infants' and children's environments, suggesting that they may be biased to orient to caregiver faces to a greater extent than faces in general. Forty-six 6- to 10-year-old children across the United States and Canada completed an online attention capture task in which participants searched for a target within arrays containing multiple distractors. During some trials, either a stranger or the child's caregiver's face appeared as one of the distractors. Children showed consistently poorer performance (i.e., increased omission errors, poorer accuracy, and slower response times) when the caregiver face appeared as a distractor, especially during trials in which the target was present and within larger search arrays. These increased performance costs indicate an enhanced orienting bias to caregiver faces, which may reflect increased motivational salience of these faces.
Descriptors: Child Caregivers, Caregiver Child Relationship, Young Children, Attention, Human Body, Foreign Countries, Error Patterns, Accuracy, Eye Movements
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United States; Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A