The role of early visual attention in social development

Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e., mother) and unfamiliar (i.e., stranger) static faces at 6, 9, and 12 months of age. Infants showed a preference for scanning their mother’s face as compared to a stranger’s face, and displayed increased attention to the eye region as compared to the mouth region. Infants also showed patterns of decreased attention to eyes and increased attention to mouths between 6 and 12 months. Associations between visual attention at 6, 9, and 12 months and the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales DP (CSBS-DP) at 18 months were also examined, and a significant positive relation between attention to eyes at 6 months and the social subscale of the CSBS-DP at 18 months was found. This effect was driven by infants’ attention to their mother’s eyes. No relations between face scanning in 9- and 12-month-olds and social outcome at 18 months were found. The potential for using individual differences in early infant face processing to predict later social outcome is discussed.

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Social Representations and Commitment

European Psychologist ◽

10.1027/1016-9040/a000317 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 233-249 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Eric Bonetto ◽

Fabien Girandola ◽

Grégory Lo Monaco

Keyword(s):

Social Representations ◽

Social Representation ◽

Second Line ◽

Review Of The Literature ◽

First Line ◽

Research Perspectives ◽

The Social ◽

Bibliographic Search ◽

English Articles

Abstract. This contribution consists of a critical review of the literature about the articulation of two traditionally separated theoretical fields: social representations and commitment. Besides consulting various works and communications, a bibliographic search was carried out (between February and December, 2016) on various databases using the keywords “commitment” and “social representation,” in the singular and in the plural, in French and in English. Articles published in English or in French, that explicitly made reference to both terms, were included. The relations between commitment and social representations are approached according to two approaches or complementary lines. The first line follows the role of commitment in the representational dynamics: how can commitment transform the representations? This articulation gathers most of the work on the topic. The second line envisages the social representations as determinants of commitment procedures: how can these representations influence the effects of commitment procedures? This literature review will identify unexploited tracks, as well as research perspectives for both areas of research.

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