Preferential looking to eyes versus mouth in early infancy

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.23462
In this Papers Podcast, Charlotte Viktorsson, a PhD student at the Development and Neurodiversity Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden, discusses her JCPP paper ‘Preferential looking to eyes versus mouth in early infancy: heritability and link to concurrent and later development’ (doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13724).
Charlotte is the first author of the paper.
There is an overview of the paper, methodology, key findings, and implications for practice.
Discussion points include;

• Why it is important to establish the relative role of genetic and environmental influences on eye preference relative to mouth preference in early infancy.
• What are the implications of what infants look at being largely based on their individual genotype, before they can select their environment by means of crawling or walking.
• Preference for eyes at 5 months was positively correlated with parent’s assessment of vocabulary at 14 months.
• No significant association was found between mouth or eye preference and later socio-communication difficulties, nor later autistic traits.
• How might these findings inform future practice or influence the way we think about infant development.
• How does an infant paying more attention to the eyes, compared to those that pay more attention to the mouth, appear to translate into later communication skills and learning?

In this series, we speak to authors of papers published in one of ACAMH’s three journals. These are The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP); The Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) journal; and JCPP Advances.