ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2023
Preferential looking to eyes versus mouth in early infancy: heritability and link to concurrent and later development.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Infant Attention to Eyes Versus Mouth Varies With Mouth Movement Speed, Family History of Autism and Language Development.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Genetic and environmental influences on data missingness in developmental cognitive neuroscience.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- No Difference in Face Scanning Patterns Between Monolingual and Bilingual Infants at 5 Months of Age.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Lack of concordance among infant social attention measures.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Introducing the kollaR package: A user-friendly open-access solution for eye-tracking analysis and visualization.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- A novel approach to exploring infant gaze patterns with AI-manipulated videos.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dissociable genetic influences on eye movements during abstract versus naturalistic social scene viewing in infancy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A look at the free-viewing paradigm in eye-tracking research to assess positive attentional bias.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Early selective attention to the articulating mouth as a potential female-specific marker of better language development in autism: a review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The impact of greening interventions in school grounds on social behavior and cognitive performance among primary school children.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Genetic and environmental contributions to gaze lateralization across social and non-social stimuli in human infants.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Infants' looking preferences for social versus non-social objects reflect genetic variation.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Stable eye versus mouth preference in a live speech-processing task.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Relationships between Intolerance of Uncertainty, Worry, Rumination, and Distress in College Students During the Coronavirus Pandemic: the Role of COVID-19 Threat Appraisals.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2023Article
- Genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in visual attention and oculomotor control in early infancy.Child developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundFrom birth, infants orient preferentially to faces, and when looking at the face, they attend primarily to eyes and mouth. These areas convey different types of information, and earlier research suggests that genetic factors influence the preference for one or the other in young children.
methodsIn a sample of 535 5-month-old infant twins, we assessed eye (relative to mouth) preference in early infancy, i.e., before neural systems for social communication and language are fully developed. We investigated the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to the preference for looking at eyes, and the association with concurrent traits and follow-up measures.
resultsEye preference was independent from all other concurrent traits measured, and had a moderate-to-high contribution from genetic influences (A = 0.57; 95% CI: 0.45, 0.66). Preference for eyes at 5 months was associated with higher parent ratings of receptive vocabulary at 14 months. No statistically significant association with later autistic traits was found. Preference for eyes was strikingly stable across different stimulus types (e.g., dynamic vs. still), suggesting that infants' preference at this age does not reflect sensitivity to low-level visual cues.
conclusionsThese results suggest that individual differences in infants' preferential looking to eyes versus mouth to a substantial degree reflect genetic variation. The findings provide new leads on both the perceptual basis and the developmental consequences of these attentional biases.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.