Attentional Prioritization of Infant Faces in Parents: The Influence of Parents’ Experiences of Care

Abstract

Infant faces are prioritized by the attentional system in parents, resulting in a greater cognitive engagement in terms of response time. However, many biological, contextual and environmental factors relating to this cognitive mechanism have been left unexplored. To fill this gap, this study aims to (i) confirm that infant faces engage more attention compared to adult faces; (ii) investigate whether the attention to infant faces is affected early care experiences of parents; (iii) explore the effect of parents’ sex by taking the amount of involvement with early childcare into consideration. 51 mothers and 46 fathers completed a modified Go/no-Go task, a brief sociodemographic questionnaire, the short version of the Adult Parental Acceptance–Rejection scale, and an ad-hoc question relating to the amount of parental involvement with early childcare. Parents’ response times were slowed in the presence of infant versus adult faces. Parents whose mother was perceived as more sensitively accepting were more engaged by infant cues. By considering the amount of early parental involvement, the sex of parents did not significantly interact with the type of face. These findings provide new insights on the attention process in response to infant cues in parents and suggest that the investigation of experience-based factors may shed further light on this topic.