Social attention is the process of perceiving visual features, such as motion patterns, that specify other people, their distinct characteristics, and their social group memberships, and it is vital to our ability to observe, understand, and participate in social interactions. The proposed experiments will provide the first comprehensive examination of infants' social attention and categorization by describing conditions under which 3- to 12-month-old infants categorize point-light displays produced from recordings of adults from different social groups. This is a formative time in perceptual and cognitive development, and it is characterized by rapid developmental change in perception and learning of environmental structure, including social information. This research will bring new findings and new theoretical perspectives to longstanding debates about the origins of social knowledge and social learning that stem from typical developmental trajectories of visual attention to social stimuli. The short-term objectives of the proposed research are to discover how developing perceptual and cognitive skills yield discrimination, categorization, identification, and learning f biological motion in infancy. The long- term goals are to clarify theories of social categorization and social development and to contribute to characterization of developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, for which there may be specific deficits in social attention. Such an understanding may lead to assessment tools more closely tailored to early diagnosis and treatment than are presently available.
Social attention is the process of perceiving visual features, such as motion patterns, that specify other people, their distinct characteristics, and their socia group memberships, and it is vital to our ability to observe, understand, and participate in social interactions. The proposed experiments will provide the first comprehensive examination of infants' social attention and categorization by describing conditions under which 3- to 12-month-old infants categorize point-light displays produced from recordings of adults from different social groups. This research will bring new findings and new theoretical perspectives to longstanding debates about the origins of social knowledge and learning that stem from altered developmental trajectories, and may shed light on possible diagnostics and treatments for developmental risk and delay.
| Tsang, Tawny; Atagi, Natsuki; Johnson, Scott P (2018) Selective attention to the mouth is associated with expressive language skills in monolingual and bilingual infants. J Exp Child Psychol 169:93-109 |
| Tsang, Tawny; Ogren, Marissa; Peng, Yujia et al. (2018) Infant perception of sex differences in biological motion displays. J Exp Child Psychol 173:338-350 |
| Ogren, Marissa; Burling, Joseph M; Johnson, Scott P (2018) Family expressiveness relates to happy emotion matching among 9-month-old infants. J Exp Child Psychol 174:29-40 |
| Singarajah, Anantha; Chanley, Jill; Gutierrez, Yoselin et al. (2017) Infant attention to same- and other-race faces. Cognition 159:76-84 |
| Freeman, Jonathan B; Johnson, Kerri L (2016) More Than Meets the Eye: Split-Second Social Perception. Trends Cogn Sci 20:362-374 |
| Bulf, Hermann; Brenna, Viola; Valenza, Eloisa et al. (2015) Many faces, one rule: the role of perceptual expertise in infants' sequential rule learning. Front Psychol 6:1595 |
| Kim, Hojin I; Johnson, Kerri L; Johnson, Scott P (2015) Gendered race: are infants' face preferences guided by intersectionality of sex and race? Front Psychol 6:1330 |
| Carpinella, Colleen M; Chen, Jacqueline M; Hamilton, David L et al. (2015) Gendered Facial Cues Influence Race Categorizations. Pers Soc Psychol Bull : |
