Faces are one of the most abundant and informative types of information in infants’ environments. Decades of research has revealed that faces capture (attention-orienting) and hold (attention-holding) infants' attention to a greater extent compared to non-faces. This allows faces to have more rapid, intensive, and thorough processing.

I have evaluated attention to different types of faces and facial features. This work helps us better understand what types of social information is prioritized in the attention system.

1. Own- vs. other-species faces:

   Part of my Master’s thesis at Tulane tested infants’ orienting and holding biases to faces of own- and other-species. This work revealed robust attention-orienting and attention-holding biases to own-species faces (Hunter & Markant, 2021).

2. Own- vs. other- race faces:

   My Master’s thesis also examined infants’ to own- and other-races. Although infants spent different durations of time looking at own- and other-race faces (i.e., attention-holding biases), we did not find race-based differences in attention orienting (Hunter & Markant, 2021). I similarly found that 6- to 10-year-old children did not show race-based attention orienting biases during an online task as a part of my dissertation (Hunter & Markant, 2023). I believe these studies demonstrate that familiarity with specific face types is insufficient to drive orienting biases.

3. Caregiver vs. stranger faces:

   My dissertation work also examined attention-orienting biases to caregiver versus stranger faces (Hunter & Markant, 2023). I found that children did show caregiver orienting biases, which I believe reflects a role of reward in attention biases. I am currently preparing a manuscript for publication that tests this idea in a sample of infants, as the rewarding attachment relationship is forming (Hunter et al., in prep).

4. Pareidolic faces:

   In collaboration with Drs. Krisztina Jakobson and Elizabeth Simpson, I developed procedures to collect data using an online platform to assess adult attention-orienting biases to objects that resemble faces (i.e., pareidolic objects). We found that pareidolic faces captured attention to a greater extent than non-facelike objects and animal faces, and were equally effective at capturing attention as human faces (Jakobsen, Hunter, & Simpson, invited revision under review).

5. Facial features (e.g., eyes vs. mouth):

   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. Similar to the work described above, I found no race-based attentional differences (Keenan, 2017). As a graduate student, 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. Infants looked more towards the eyes during negative valenced messages (prohibition, comforting) than during positive or neutral valenced messages. However, this increased attention to the eyes during negative valenced messages did not facilitate subsequent gaze cueing responses (Noonan, Hunter, & Markant, 2021). Together, these investigations demonstrate that variability in emotional communication but perhaps not face race shapes infants' attention to face features.