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Emotional facial expressions are thought to have evolved because they play a crucial role in species’ survival. From infancy, humans develop dedicated neural circuits [1] to exhibit and recognize a variety of facial expressions [2]. But there is increasing evidence that culture specifies when and how certain emotions can be expressed — social norms — and that the mature perceptual mechanisms used to transmit and decode the visual information from emotional signals differ between Western and Eastern adults [3–5]. Specifically, the mouth is more informative for transmitting emotional signals in Westerners and the eye region for Easterners [4], generating culture-specific fixation biases towards these features [5]. During development, it is recognized that cultural differences can be observed at the level of emotional reactivity and regulation [6], and to the culturally dominant modes of attention [7]. Nonetheless, to our knowledge no study has explored whether culture shapes the processing of facial emotional signals early in development. The data we report here show that, by 7 months, infants from both cultures visually discriminate facial expressions of emotion by relying on culturally distinct fixation strategies, resembling those used by the adults from the environment in which they develop [5].

Orienting visual attention allows us to properly select relevant visual information from a noisy environment. Despite extensive investigation of the orienting of visual attention in infancy, it is unknown whether and how stimulus characteristics modulate the deployment of attention from birth to 4 months of age, a period in which the efficiency in orienting of attention improves dramatically. The aim of the present study was to compare 4-month-old infants' and newborns' ability to orient attention from central to peripheral stimuli that have the same or different attributes. In Experiment 1, all the stimuli were dynamic and the only attribute of the central and peripheral stimuli to be manipulated was face orientation. In Experiment 2, both face orientation and motion of the central and peripheral stimuli were contrasted. The number of valid trials and saccadic latency were measured at both ages. Our results demonstrated that the deployment of attention is mainly influenced by motion at birth, while it is also influenced by face orientation at 4-month of age. These findings provide insight into the development of the orienting visual attention in the first few months of life and suggest that maturation may be not the only factor that determines the developmental change in orienting visual attention from birth to 4 months.

The current study examined the temporal dynamics of coarse and fine spatial information processing in 7-to 8-month-old infants. The ability to discriminate between spatiallyfiltered images was assessed by measuring infants' spontaneous preference for a changing over no-changing image sequences. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that infants were ableto discriminate between low spatial frequency (LSF) image sequences at shorter durations(150 ms) than was the case with high spatial frequency (HSF) images (300 ms). When the LSFand HSF changes were pitted against each other in hybrid images containing both spatial frequencies (Experiment 3), the 7-to 8-month-old infants showed a preference for the LSF change across all tested durations (150 ms to 600 ms). However, infants' processing of hybrid image sequences was modulated both by changes in the relative contrast energy betweenLSFs and HSFs (Experiment 4), and image duration (Experiment 5). Finally, we found that in 12-to 13-month-old infants, the shift toward HSF dominance occurred at shorter durationthan in 7-to 8-month-old infants (Experiment 6). Our findings are among the first to provide a temporal characterization of coarse-to-fine processing in infants' perception. Possible links to the development of specialized visual pathways are discussed. © 2014 American Psychological Association.