Faces are a rich source of information in an infant’s environment. Specific features of faces (e.g., the eyes) may contain information about identity, emotion, and communicative intentions of a person. Infants can use eye movements to scan faces and gather this information. In my research, I have asked how different characteristics of faces, such as race or emotional content, influences how infants visually explore these face features. Further, I have asked whether this visual exploration may facilitate effective linguistic and social skills.

In my Honor’s thesis conducted at the University of Florida, I investigated how 6- and 9-month-old infants looked at the eye and mouth regions of own- and other-race faces, and whether looking towards the mouth during periods of heightened language learning (i.e., in 9-month-old infants) is related to measures of expressive and receptive language skills. This research revealed that face race had different effects on infants’ looking to face regions and the number of overall visual fixations infants made, confirming a growing recognition in the literature that these effects are nuanced and are reflected in different aspects of infants’ looking behavior.

As a graduate student at Tulane University, I investigated the effect of a different face property, the dynamic emotional message being expressed, on 6-month-old infants’ attention to the eyes vs. mouths of faces during dynamic emotional messages. In this study, infants looked more towards the eyes during negative valenced messages (prohibition, comforting) than during positive or neutral valenced messages. In this work, I also examined whether increased attention to the eyes during these messages predicted subsequent gaze following behaviors. Although infants’ attention to different facial features varied by emotional message, increased attention to the eyes when negative valenced messages were being conveyed did not facilitate subsequent gaze cueing responses (Noonan, Hunter, & Markant, 2021). Together, these investigations demonstrate that variability in face race and emotional communication and face race shapes infants' attention to face features.