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Abstract

Infants rely on social interactions for learning and obtaining critical information about their environment. One way that people express attitudes and opinions is through facial expressions, which represent shifting internal emotional states. Facial expressions are neither static nor random; they are constantly changing, and certain ones are more likely to occur together than others. Learning the statistical regularities in facial expressions is important in being able to predict others’ future emotional states, and make decisions accordingly. This study looks at the extent to which infants are aware of the different transition probabilities of dynamic facial expressions, and if this understanding is influenced by their caregiver’s own particular emotional tendencies. Pupil synchrony results found that infants aged 7-10 months process likely emotion transitions more consistently than unlikely ones, suggesting that they a) pay attention to facial expressions and b) track the statistical regularities of facial expressions in their environments and are able to tell apart likely vs. unlikely transitions. A parent survey found that parents believe their infants to have similar emotion dynamics as themselves, but pupil synchrony in infants as it related to parent similarity was inconclusive.