Emotion first: children prioritize emotional faces in gaze-cued attentional orienting

Children shift their attention based on the gaze direction of another person but it is unclear whether they prioritize only the gaze of fearful faces over neutral ones or more generally, the gaze of emotional faces. School children performed a gaze-cueing task, in which central, non-predictive happy, angry, and neutral face-cues were briefly presented with averted gaze. Findings for 9–10-year-old children showed that the magnitude of gaze-cueing effects for happy and angry face-cues was similar and it was particularly larger with angry compared to neutral face-cues. In contrast, 6–7-year-old children showed gaze-cueing effects only with happy face-cues. The present findings clearly indicate that older children show emotion-enhanced gaze-cueing effects. In contrast, younger children did not show gaze-cueing effects with neutral and angry faces but they did with happy faces. The implications of age differences in the ability to prioritize emotional faces when shifting attention based on the observed gaze direction of a non-predictive face-cue are discussed in the context of the extant literature.