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Some babies lean towards faces, while others show a preference for non-social objects such as cars or household items. Meanwhile, the manner in which we explore the surrounding environment with our eyes affects our focus, thoughts, and learning. But what influences this behavior? Researchers from Uppsala University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, along with the Royal College in London, UK, have demonstrated that infant visual preferences have a biological basis.
Methodology
This study is part of the research project Babytwins Study Sweden. Over 5,000 monozygotic and dizygotic twins were examined using child-friendly methods at the Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at the Karolinska Institute. Researchers observed infants from five months to three years.
First, the gaze direction of five-month-old infants was measured using an infant friendly eye-tracking device. Then, scientists observed the cognitive and neural development of twins, correlating the data with their visual preferences.
What Scientists Discovered
The inclination towards perceiving the world in one way or another through the eyes can largely be explained by genetics. The family environment did not explain preferences for social or non-social behavior at such an early stage of life.
Our results suggest that even before infants can influence and choose their environment by pointing, crawling or walking, they create their own unique perceptual experiences by systematically looking more at social or non-social objects, preferences that can be largely explained by genetic differences between children.
Ana Maria Portugal, Postdoctoral Researcher and first author of the study
Dr. Portugal notes that the visual preferences of genetically identical twins were more similar than those of dizygotic twins. For instance, if one monozygotic twin in a pair tended to gaze mostly at non-social objects, the other twin typically shared similar preferences. In contrast to monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins share, on average, only 50% of their genes. Therefore, their ways of visually exploring the world were less alike.
Impact of Infant Visual Preferences on Subsequent Development
Researchers found that the inclination towards gazing at faces at the age of five months was associated with an increased vocabulary by the second year of life. Differences in external behavior could potentially influence parent-child interactions. However, favoring non-social objects is not necessarily negative; it is also important for cognitive development, as explained by Dr. Portugal.
According to the scientists, the results suggest that infants’ preference for faces is not strongly linked to later social communication abilities in childhood. No significant differences were observed between boys and girls in terms of this preference.
