Are 6-month-old human infants able to transfer emotional information (happy or angry) from voices to faces? An eye-tracking study

PLoS One. 2018 Apr 11;13(4):e0194579. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194579. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

The present study examined whether 6-month-old infants could transfer amodal information (i.e. independently of sensory modalities) from emotional voices to emotional faces. Thus, sequences of successive emotional stimuli (voice or face from one sensory modality -auditory- to another sensory modality -visual-), corresponding to a cross-modal transfer, were displayed to 24 infants. Each sequence presented an emotional (angry or happy) or neutral voice, uniquely, followed by the simultaneous presentation of two static emotional faces (angry or happy, congruous or incongruous with the emotional voice). Eye movements in response to the visual stimuli were recorded with an eye-tracker. First, results suggested no difference in infants' looking time to happy or angry face after listening to the neutral voice or the angry voice. Nevertheless, after listening to the happy voice, infants looked longer at the incongruent angry face (the mouth area in particular) than the congruent happy face. These results revealed that a cross-modal transfer (from auditory to visual modalities) is possible for 6-month-old infants only after the presentation of a happy voice, suggesting that they recognize this emotion amodally.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Anger
  • Emotions / physiology*
  • Eye Movements*
  • Face
  • Facial Expression*
  • Female
  • Happiness
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Male
  • Photic Stimulation
  • Visual Perception / physiology*
  • Voice*

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the Swiss National Fund for the research grant 100019-156073 awarded to E.G.