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Do Faces Facilitate Or Distract Children From Attending To Threats?, Sarah A. Skidmore
Do Faces Facilitate Or Distract Children From Attending To Threats?, Sarah A. Skidmore
Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019
Threatening stimuli may produce an attentional bias in humans, capturing and holding attention to a greater extent than other types of stimuli. Humans rely on others to alert their attention to threats in their environment, and social stimuli, such as faces, have privileged processing compared to nonsocial stimuli. We wanted to explore whether task-irrelevant fearful or neutral faces facilitate, distract, or have no effect on the detection of threatening or neutral images (spiders and frogs, respectively). Three- to-five-year-old children (N=37) completed a visual search task in which they searched for threatening or neutral animals. Consistent with previous literature, we found …