Heck and Colleagues (2016) claimed that 5-month-olds exhibit enhanced attention to fearful faces in videos.
Grossman and Jensen (2016) suggested that infants may have been responding to movement rather than emotion.
We tested infants with inverted versions of the videos and found no effects of movement.
Thus, infants’ performance with upright stimuli was not due to low-level features like movement.
These results indicate systematic attention to fear early in life.