The Study Of Adults’ Attentional Bias To Different Expression Baby’s Face

Adults’ attentional bias towards the baby’s face is the primary manifestation of the baby’s schema effect(Kindchenschema,or baby schema),and it is also a prerequisite for the infant to induce attention,positive emotional and care motivation of adults’ preference responses.However,the current research mainly focuses on the discussion of the characteristics of attentional bias under neutral expressions and individual time-course conditions.Meanwhile,these researches lack strict control of the face structure,which causes leads to the current research results are not yet systematic and comprehensive.The study used 32 infants and 32 adults with the same face and multiple expressions(happy,neutral,and sad)pairs of pictures as experimental materials.Through the study 1 that the presentation time was different by only stimuli(100ms,500 ms,and 1000ms)three-point detection behavior experiment and the study 2 with a long-term(5000ms)eye-tracking human survival and reproduction.Thus,in order to explore systematically the characteristics of the time course of adults’ attentional bias towards baby’s face,and the role of expression and gender in them.The specific results of research are as follow:Firstly,in the early(100ms),middle(500ms),and late(1000ms)attention stages,adults show significant attentional bias toward baby’s faces on three expression.However,adults’ attentional bias only toward neutral infants’ s faces in long-duration free-viewing.Thus,adults’ attentional bias towards neutral infants’ s faces is the most stable over time.And this attentional bias exhibits the cognitive processing characteristics including early-term orientation attention,mid-term investment enhancement and late-term attention maintenance under the influence of innate responses and emotional correlation evaluation.Secondly,in the early attention stage of 100 milliseconds,the adult’s attentional bias toward the baby’s face will be regulated by the expression,that is,the neutrality’s attentional bias is the largest,followed by happiness and finally sadness.Meanwhile,this result is supported by the persistent attention bias of neutral infants under eye-movement experiments.Thus,this study supports the assumption of "maximum effect of neutral expression of infant face schema" proposed by Cheng Gang et al.(2019)to a certain extent.Finally,although adults show biased features towards the baby’s face at different time points and continuous free-viewing,there are no significant gender differences.This result is consistent with the structural characteristics of human beings as communal parenting,which reflects both sexes have evolved the psychological mechanism of alert response to baby’s face in order to achieve for the continuation of life.However,in view of sampling is single in this study,which suggest further studies on other groups is warranted.Based on the results of this study,it’s not hard to see that: Firstly,the attentional bias of adults on baby faces will exist at different levels of attention processing over time.That mainly because the biologically valuable baby faces are closely related to human survival and reproduction.Thus baby faces have priority in automatic and voluntary attention.Secondly,this attention bias feature will be regulated by the type of expression.Among them,the maximum effect of the neutral baby’s face pattern effect may be the reason for the early attention bias being regulated by the expression.The neutral expression plays an important role in which the baby gets more attention from adults in early stage of attention.