How Infants Direct Their Gaze to Faces in the Presence of Other Objects: The Development of Face Preference Between 4 and 7 Months After Birth

From early in development, infants process faces in their environment differentially from other items. By around 6 months of age, they are able to orient toward faces in the presence of distractor items. This paper aimed to assess whether this preferential looking toward faces was observable prior to 6 months of age, and whether there were developmental trends. We assessed this using the face pop-out task, a free viewing eye-tracking experiment in which infants viewed arrays containing an image of a face, alongside four distractor items. We assessed whether infants at 4, 5, 6 and 7 months (n = 1585 participants) differed in the proportion of first looks, total dwell time, and frequency of fixations to faces compared to other items. All three outcome variables were significantly higher toward faces than toward any of the other items in all the age groups. Moreover, there were age-related differences across all measures—the older the infants were, the more pronounced their face preferences were. These age-related differences could not be attributed to differences in data quality, and thus suggest that face preference is observable at 4 months of age but shows a strong development until 6 months.