Endogenous Control and Reward-based Mechanisms Shape Infants' Attention Biases to Caregiver Faces.

Infants rely on developing attention skills to identify relevant stimuli in their environments. Although caregivers are socially rewarding and a critical source of information, they are also one of many stimuli that compete for infants' attention. Young infants preferentially hold attention on caregiver faces, but it is unknown whether they also preferentially orient to caregivers and the extent to which these attention biases reflect reward-based attention mechanisms.

Pareidolic faces receive prioritized attention in the dot-probe task.

Face pareidolia occurs when random or ambiguous inanimate objects are perceived as faces. While real faces automatically receive prioritized attention compared with nonface objects, it is unclear whether pareidolic faces similarly receive special attention. We hypothesized that, given the evolutionary importance of broadly detecting animacy, pareidolic faces may have enough faceness to activate a broad face template, triggering prioritized attention.

6- to 10-year-old children do not show race-based orienting biases to faces during an online attention capture task.

Research has established that frequency of exposure to own- and other-race faces shapes the development of face processing biases characterized by enhanced attention to and recognition of more familiar own-race faces, that is, the other-race effect (ORE). The ORE is first evident during infancy based on differences in looking to own- versus other-race faces and is later assessed based on recognition memory task performance during childhood and adulthood. Using these measures, researchers have found that race-based face processing biases initially develop during infancy but remain sensitive to experiences with own- and other-race faces through childhood.

Caregiver faces capture 6- to 10-year-old children's attention during an online visual search task.

Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli, it is unclear whether specific types of faces capture attention to a greater extent than others.

Y1 receptors modulate taste-related behavioral responsiveness in male mice to prototypical gustatory stimuli.

Mammalian taste bud cells express receptors for numerous peptides implicated elsewhere in the body in the regulation of metabolism, nutrient assimilation, and satiety. The perturbation of several peptide signaling pathways in the gustatory periphery results in changes in behavioral and/or physiological responsiveness to subsets of taste stimuli. We previously showed that Peptide YY (PYY) - which is present in both saliva and in subsets of taste cells - can affect behavioral taste responsiveness and reduce food intake and body weight.

Dynamic emotional messages differentially affect 6-month-old infants' attention to eyes and gaze cues.

Infants often experience interactions in which caregivers use dynamic messages to convey their affective and communicative intent. These dynamic emotional messages may shape the development of emotion discrimination skills and shared attention by influencing infants' attention to internal facial features and their responses to eye gaze cues. However, past research examining infants' responses to emotional faces has predominantly focused on classic, stereotyped expressions (e.