Emotional facial expressions affect visual rule learning in 7- to 8-month-old infants

Rule learning (RL) is an implicit learning mechanism that allows infants to detect and generalize rule-like repetition-based patterns (such as ABB and ABA) from a sequence of elements. Increasing evidence shows that RL operates both in the auditory and the visual domain and is modulated by the perceptual expertise with the to-be-learned stimuli. Yet, whether infants’ ability to detect a high-order rule from a sequence of stimuli is affected by affective information remains a largely unexplored issue. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we investigated whether the presence of emotional expressions with a positive and a negative value (i.e., happiness and anger) modulates 7- to 8-month-old infants’ ability to learn a rule-like pattern from a sequence of faces of different identities. Results demonstrate that emotional facial expressions (either positive and negative) modulate infants’ visual RL mechanism, even though positive and negative facial expressions affect infants’ RL in a different manner: while anger disrupts infants’ ability to learn the rule-like pattern from a face sequence, in the presence of a happy face infants show a familiarity preference, thus maintaining their learning ability. These findings show that emotional expressions exert an influence on infants’ RL abilities, contributing to the investigation on how emotion and cognition interact in face processing during infancy.