How ostracism and early regulatory capacities shape 8-month-old infants' disengagement from faces

Introduction: The ability to orient attention toward social stimuli emerges early in life and plays a crucial role in supporting social, communicative, and cognitive development. Adverse experiences, such as ostracism, have been shown to bias these attentional processes. While this phenomenon has been investigated in adults and older children, little is known about how similar in-person experiences influence attentional processes in infancy.Methods: The present research investigated whether being included or ostracized in a live triadic ball-tossing game affects 8-month-old infants' (N = 54) attentional disengagement from social vs. non-social stimuli. This study also explored the role of temperament-based, attention-mediated regulation in modulating the effects of social exclusion on such attentional mechanisms. Firstly, a live ball-tossing game was implemented where infants were either included or ostracized, and their behavior and emotional responses were recorded and coded. Following the game, infants completed a disengagement task involving centrally presented structured and scrambled faces, while their eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracking system.Results: Data indicated that ostracized infants were slower to disengage from structured faces; however, those with higher orienting/regulation scores disengaged more quickly. Behavioral results showed reduced positive emotionality, increased negative emotionality, and more active engagement behaviors in ostracized infants compared to included ones.Discussion: Overall, these findings show that ostracism influences infants' behavioral reactivity and attentional disengagement from social cues as early as 8 months, and that, in turn, this effect is modulated by infants' temperamental traits, highlighting the interplay between adverse environmental experiences and individual predispositions in early social development.