Perceptual learning is robust to manipulations of valence and arousal in childhood and adulthood.

Despite clear links between affective processes in many areas of cognition and perception, the influence of affective valence and arousal on low-level perceptual learning have remained largely unexplored. Such influences could have the potential to disrupt or enhance learning that would have long-term consequences for young learners. The current study manipulated 8- to 11-year-old children's and young adults' mood using video clips (to induce a positive mood) or a psychosocial stressor (to induce a negative mood). Each participant then completed one session of a low-level visual learning task (visual texture paradigm). Using novel computational methods, we did not observe evidence for the modulation of visual perceptual learning by manipulations of emotional arousal or valence in either children or adults. The majority of results supported a model of perceptual learning that is overwhelmingly constrained to the task itself and independent from external factors such as variations in learners' affect.

Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children.

Electrophysiological studies on adults suggest that humans are efficient at detecting threat from facial information and tend to grant these signals a priority in access to attention, awareness, and action. The developmental origins of this bias are poorly understood, partly because few studies have examined the emergence of a generalized neural and behavioral response to distinct categories of threat in early childhood. We used event-related potential (ERP) and eye-tracking measures to examine children's early visual responses and overt attentional biases towards multiple exemplars of angry and fearful vs. other (e.g., happy and neutral) faces. A large group of children was assessed longitudinally in infancy (5, 7, or 12 months) and at 3 years of age. The final ERP dataset included 148 infants and 132 3-year-old children; and the final eye-tracking dataset included 272 infants and 334 3-year-olds. We demonstrate that 1) neural and behavioral responses to facial expressions converge on an enhanced response to fearful and angry faces at 3 years of age, with no differentiation between or bias towards one or the other of these expressions, and 2) a support vector machine learning model using data on the early-stage neural responses to threat reliably predicts the duration of overt attentional dwell time for threat-related faces at 3 years. However, we found little within-subject correlation between threat-bias attention in infancy and at 3 years of age. These results provide unique evidence for the early development of a rapid, unified response to two distinct categories of facial expressions with different physical characteristics, but shared threat-related meaning.