The influence of infantile cues on motivated perception of threats among caregivers
Human infants are born helpless and entirely dependent on their adult caregivers for survival. It is this very helplessness, however, that serves as a powerful signal to nearby adults and reorganizes attention towards potential dangers. As members of an altricial and alloparental species, adults are...
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2025-04-01
|
| Series: | Acta Psychologica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825000927 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Human infants are born helpless and entirely dependent on their adult caregivers for survival. It is this very helplessness, however, that serves as a powerful signal to nearby adults and reorganizes attention towards potential dangers. As members of an altricial and alloparental species, adults are perceptually sensitive to infantile cues. Infants change how adults attend to the world around them as well as how adults perceive affordances that can shape adaptive caregiving behaviors. By being sensitive to the presence of an infant, and their potential for getting into danger, adults can make decisions and respond to potential threats in ways that keep children safe from harm. Thus, we argue that parenthood represents a developmental transition that builds on existing perceptual biases, such as greater attention towards infantile cues, and serves as a useful model for studying threat perception. Here we review evidence that the task of providing care to children shapes how adults process information about threat, such as attention towards potential threat cues, perception of the social and physical world, and judgment of risk under uncertainty. We propose a theoretical framework of threat perception that focuses on how the demands of being a social altricial species, namely the demands of providing care to young, influence perceptual systems and plays a strong role in organizing how adults view the world around them. The motivated perceptual experiences of caregivers represent an untapped area of research that can increase our understanding of perceptual function and plasticity across the lifespan. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0001-6918 |