Look up to the body: an eye-tracking investigation of 7-months-old infants' visual exploration of emotion body expressions

TY - JOUR

T1 - Look up to the body

T2 - an eye-tracking investigation of 7-months-old infants' visual exploration of emotion body expressions

AU - Geangu, Elena

AU - Vuong, Quoc

N1 - © Elsevier B.V., 2020. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.

PY - 2020/8

Y1 - 2020/8

N2 - The human body is an important source of information to infer a person’s emotional state. Research with adult observers indicate that the posture of the torso, arms and hands provide important perceptual cues for recognising anger, fear and happy expressions. Much less is known about whether infants process body regions differently for different body expressions. To address this issue, we used eye tracking to investigate whether infants’ visual exploration patterns differed when viewing body expressions. Forty-eight 7-months-old infants were randomly presented with static images of adult female bodies expressing anger, fear and happiness, as well as an emotionally-neutral posture. Facial cues to emotional state were removed by masking the faces. We measured the proportion of looking time, proportion and number of fixations, and duration of fixations on the head, upper body and lower body regions for the different expressions. We showed that infants explored the upper body more than the lower body. Importantly, infants at this age fixated differently on different body regions depending on the expression of the body posture. In particular, infants spent a larger proportion of their looking times and had longer fixation durations on the upper body for fear relative to the other expressions. These results extend and replicate the information about infant processing of emotional expressions displayed by human bodies, and they support the hypothesis that infants’ visual exploration of human bodies is driven by the upper body.

AB - The human body is an important source of information to infer a person’s emotional state. Research with adult observers indicate that the posture of the torso, arms and hands provide important perceptual cues for recognising anger, fear and happy expressions. Much less is known about whether infants process body regions differently for different body expressions. To address this issue, we used eye tracking to investigate whether infants’ visual exploration patterns differed when viewing body expressions. Forty-eight 7-months-old infants were randomly presented with static images of adult female bodies expressing anger, fear and happiness, as well as an emotionally-neutral posture. Facial cues to emotional state were removed by masking the faces. We measured the proportion of looking time, proportion and number of fixations, and duration of fixations on the head, upper body and lower body regions for the different expressions. We showed that infants explored the upper body more than the lower body. Importantly, infants at this age fixated differently on different body regions depending on the expression of the body posture. In particular, infants spent a larger proportion of their looking times and had longer fixation durations on the upper body for fear relative to the other expressions. These results extend and replicate the information about infant processing of emotional expressions displayed by human bodies, and they support the hypothesis that infants’ visual exploration of human bodies is driven by the upper body.

KW - infancy

KW - emotion expressions

KW - eye-tracking

KW - body

UR - https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bUesbDG3z0FO

U2 - 10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101473

DO - 10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101473

M3 - Article

SN - 0163-6383

VL - 60

JO - Infant Behavior and Development

JF - Infant Behavior and Development

M1 - 101473

ER -