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The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5-12 years and adults (N = 129) explored faces with a mouse-controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An age-related increase in attention to the left eye emerged at age 11-12 years and reached significance in adulthood. This left-eye bias is consistent with previous eye tracking research and findings of a perceptual bias for the left side of faces. These results suggest that a strategic attentional bias to the left eye begins to emerge at age 11-12 years and is likely established sometime in adolescence.
Birmingham et al. (Tue,) studied this question.