Infants are sensitive to cultural differences in emotions at 11 months

A myriad of emotion perception studies has shown infants’ ability to discriminate different emotional categories, yet there has been little investigation of infants’ perception of cultural differences in emotions. Hence little is known about the extent to which culture-specific emotion information is recognised in the beginning of life. Caucasian Australian infants of 10–12 months participated in a visual-paired comparison task where their preferential looking patterns to three types of infant-directed emotions (anger, happiness, surprise) from two different cultures (Australian, Japanese) were examined. Differences in racial appearances were controlled. Infants exhibited preferential looking to Japanese over Caucasian Australian mothers’ angry and surprised expressions, whereas no difference was observed in trials involving East-Asian Australian mothers. In addition, infants preferred Caucasian Australian mothers’ happy expressions. These findings suggest that 11-month-olds are sensitive to cultural differences in spontaneous infant-directed emotional expressions when they are combined with a difference in racial appearance.

Attentional Measures of Memory in Typically Developing and Hypoxic–Ischemic Injured Infants

Hypoxic–ischemic injury (HII) at birth has been found to relate to differences in development, including decreased memory performance. The current study assessed recognition memory in 6- and 12-month-old HII infants and typically developing (TD) infants using two eye-tracking paradigms well suited to explore explicit memory processes early in life: visual paired comparison (VPC) and relational memory (RM). During the VPC, infants were familiarized to a face and then tested for their novelty preference immediately and after a two-minute delay. At 6 months, neither HII nor TD showed a VPC novelty preference at immediate delay, but at 12 months, both groups did; after the two-minute delay, no group showed a novelty preference. During RM, infants were presented with blocks containing a learning phase with three different scene–face pairs, and a test phase with one of the three scenes and all three faces appearing simultaneously. When there was no interference from other scene–face pairs between learning and test, 6-month-old TD showed evidence of an early novelty preference, but when there was interference, they revealed an early familiarity preference. For 12-month-old TD, some evidence for a novelty preference during RM was seen regardless of interference. Although HII and TD showed similar recognition memory on the VPC, when looking at RM, HII infants showed subtle differences in their attention to the familiar and novel faces as compared to their TD peers, suggesting that there might be subtle differences in the underlying memory processing mechanisms between HII and TD. More work is needed to understand how these attentional patterns might be predictive of later memory outcomes.

WEBCAMERA-BASED VISUAL PAIRED COMPARISON AS A REMOTE COGNITIVE SCREENING METHOD

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a form of dementia impacting memory and cognitive function of 131 million individuals worldwide. Though early cognitive decline detection is important, cognitive screening is limited among older adults and many cases go undetected. As easy-to-use cognitive assessments are not readily available to the general population, the purpose of this investigation was to determine the ability of a 5-minute webcamera-based eye-tracking cognitive assessment to discriminate between cognitively intact adults and adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or AD. This prospective study included 56 participants (age=55.9±26.8) divided into three groups: younger cognitively intact (ages 18-46 years, n=25), older cognitively intact (ages >60 years, n=20), and older cognitively impaired participants with MCI or AD (ages>60 years, n=13). All participants completed the Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST) and Visual Paired Comparison test (VPC) to assess cognition. One-way ANOVA detected differences in cognition between groups. A Pearson correlation determined the association between cognitive assessments. Additionally, multiple regression determined the ability of VPC and age to predict DSST scores. Results revealed significant differences between cognitively intact and cognitively impaired groups for VPC (p=.001) and DSST (p<.001). Follow-up analyses revealed significant differences between cognitively intact and cognitively impaired adults (p=.005) with no differences between younger and older cognitively intact adults (p=.34). There was a significant association between the VPC and DSST cognitive assessments (r=.54, p<.001), with VPC and age accounting for 69% of the variation in DSST. These results support the use of webcamera-based VPC as a viable option when screening tool MCI/AD.

Memory for complex visual objects but not for allocentric locations during the first year of life

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual patterns during the first year of life. In the first experiment, 6- and 9-month-old infants were familiarized with visual arrays composed of four abstract patterns arranged in a square configuration. Recognition memory was evaluated by presenting infants with the familiarized array paired with a novel array composed of four new patterns. The second couple of experiments aimed to examine infant ability to encode the spatial relationships between each pattern of the array (e.g., where is A in the square configuration). The 6-, 9- and 12-month-old infants were tested on a spatial version of the VPC task, in which the novel array was composed of the same patterns than the familiarized array but arranged differently within the square configuration. Results indicated that infants retained the identity of the patterns but not their specific spatial relationships within the square configuration (i.e., allocentric location of the patterns), suggesting either an immaturity of the processes involved in object-to-location binding, or the inappropriateness of unfamiliar complex objects to reveal such early allocentric abilities.