Infancy Social development

a b s t r a c t In simple tests of preference, infants as young as newborns prefer faces and face-like stim-uli over distractors. Little is known, however, about the development of attention to faces in complex scenes. We recorded eye-movements of 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old infants and adults during free-viewing of clips from A Charlie Brown Christmas (an animated film). The tendency to look at faces increased with age. Using novel computational tools, we found that 3-month-olds were less consistent (across individuals) in where they looked than were older infants. Moreover, younger infants ’ fixations were best predicted by low-level image salience, rather than the locations of faces. Between 3 and 9 months of age, infants gradually focused their attention on faces. We discuss several possible inter-pretations of this shift in terms of social development, cross-modal integration, and atten-tional/executive control.! 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1