Browsing by Subject "face preference"

Objectives: Early recognition of developmental challenges in infancy is central for being able to start interventions earlier with possible better outcomes. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of using eye-tracking at seven months to predict adaptive behavior outcomes at two years. Adaptive behavior implies the child's adaptation to their specific living environment and it includes aspects of conceptual, social and practical adaptation. Here, I studied several eye-tracking based markers of visual attention in infancy for their possible association with adaptive behavior at two years, such as saccadic reaction time (SRT) and measures of attentional preference for faces and emotional facial expressions. SRT has been shown to be a general attentional marker in infancy associated with many developmental and clinical aspects while attentional preference for faces and emotional facial expressions are pronounced at seven months and have been hypothesized to play a role in socio-emotional development. Infants were also studied with respect to attentional behavioral tendencies based on their SRT measures. Methods: This study employed material from the Toibilas-study at BABA center at Helsinki University Hospital. The study consisted of 45 children of either typical development (n=26) or children of high developmental risk (n=19) due to their prior treatment at the neonatal intensive care unit. The high-risk group was assumed to increase variability of the sample. Infants participated in eye-tracking measurements at seven months old using two different eye-tracking paradigms; a SRT task and a task measuring attentional bias for facial vs. non-facial as well as emotional facial expressions vs. neutral facial expressions. The same children were assessed for adaptive behavior at two years of age by a parent filled-questionnaire. Associations between attentional behavioral markers at seven months and adaptive behavior at two years were analyzed using linear models. The models also accounted for behavioral attentional tendency as identified from a set of SRT measures. Results and conclusions: A bigger attentional preference for faces compared to non-faces was associated with better overall adaptive behavior score as well as adaptive behavior composites for conceptual and practical adaptive behavior. This is in line with the hypothesis that attentional bias for faces is important for socio-emotional development. A significant association between identified behavioral attentional tendencies and the conceptual composite score of adaptive behavior was found. This finding suggests that recognizing attentional tendency may be useful for predicting later developmental trajectories. The present work provides preliminary evidence for the proof of principle that eye-tracking based metrics may provide clinically relevant predictions in infants, however novel prospective datasets are needed for clinical validation.