Infants’ visual preference for infant-directed (ID) faces over adult-directed (AD) faces was examined in two experiments that introduced controls for emotion. Infants’ eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of side-by-side dynamic faces. When emotion was held constant, 6-month-old infants showed no preference for ID faces over AD faces, but a second group of infants looked significantly longer at AD faces conveying happy emotion over sad ID faces conveying sad emotion. Together, these findings suggest that infants’ visual preference for ID faces is mediated, at least in part, by the presence of happy emotion. The relations between happy emotion and ID faces are discussed.
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Kim et al. (2013) studied this question.
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