Development of the other-race effect during infancy: Evidence toward universality?

Kelly, David J.; Liu, Shaoying; Lee, Kang; Quinn, Paul C.; Pascalis, Olivier; Slater, Alan; Ge, Liezhong

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.01.006

Cited by 266 publications

(331 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…Indeed, prior literature demonstrates that face processing is sensitive to environmental input. Face perception shows adaptation effects (24), perceptual narrowing occurs with development (25,26), and recognition of faces from infrequently observed races is notoriously poor (27,28). Extreme environmental variables, such as visual deprivation in the months after birth, also have an impact on face processing (29).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable

Wilmer

Germine

Chabris

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

434

402

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Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.behavioral genetic | face recognition | individual differences | specialist gene | generalist gene G eneral intelligence, or g, has received great attention in both quantitative genetic and molecular genetic studies of cognition (1). Strong heritability is shown by g, and neurobiological correlates of g have been identified (1-4). However, molecular studies searching for genetic correlates of g have only found chromosomal regions with very small effects (5), and studies identifying candidate genes often fail to replicate (6). On the other hand, recent studies investigating reading and spoken language, abilities that rely on more specific cognitive and neural mechanisms, have identified major contributing genes (7,8). Thus, at least some specific abilities appear relatively tractable to genetic investigation, and it is plausible that abilities involving fewer cognitive and neural mechanisms may generally depend on fewer genes. However, heritabilities of cognitive traits typically decrease as their relation to g decreases, and few highly heritable specific abilities have been identified (1, 9). We present here an exception to this trend by demonstrating both high heritability and face specificity of face recognition ability, whose well-defined neural basis and established animal models provide promising tools for investigating its genetic basis at the neural level (10).Face recognition is a paradigmatic example of a cognitively and neurally dissociable trait. Psychophysical studies suggest that the cognitive representation of faces relies on different computational processes than other stimuli (11), and neuroimaging has identified occipitotemporal areas in humans and macaques that respond much more strongly to faces than to other stimuli (12). Single-unit recording shows that macaque face patches consist of cells that respond exclusively to faces (13). Consistent with these findings, studies with patients and transcranial magnetic stimulation have demonstrated selective i...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable

Wilmer

Germine

Chabris

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

434

402

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Kelly et al [56] showed that Caucasian infants at three months of age show recognition memory for individual faces within Caucasian, Chinese, Middle Eastern and African races, while nine-month-olds only showed recognition memory for own-race Caucasian faces. In addition, Kelly et al [57] showed that Chinese infants undergo a similar course of perceptual narrowing in that increased exposure to Chinese faces leads to a recognition memory only for own-race Chinese faces at nine months of age.…”

Section: Face Processing (A) Adultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants' knowledge of their own species

Heron-Delaney

Wirth

Pascalis

2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Recognition of individuals at first sight is important for social species and can be achieved by attending to facial or body information. Previous research suggests that infants possess a perceptual template for evolutionarily relevant stimuli, which may include humans, dangerous animals (e.g. snakes), but not non-dangerous animals. To be effective, such a mechanism should result in a systematic preference for attending to humans over non-dangerous animals. Using a preferential looking paradigm, the present studies investigated the nature of infants' early representation of humans. We show that 3.5-and six-month-old infants attend more to human beings than nonhuman primates (a gorilla or monkey) which are examplars of non-dangerous animals. This occurred when infants were presented with head or body information in isolation, as well as when both are presented simultaneously. This early preference for humans by 3.5 months of age suggests that there is a basic representation for humans, which includes both head and/or body information. However, neonates demonstrated a preference only for human faces over nonhuman primate faces, not for humans over non-human primates when the stimuli were presented with both head and body simultaneously. The results show that although neonates display a preference for human faces over others, preference for the human body only develops later, in the first few months of life. This suggests that infants have acquired some knowledge about the human body at 3.5 months of age that may have developed from their privileged experience with other humans in the first few months of life, rather than an innate ability to detect humans in their entirety.

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“…Yet, the cross-species issue is of special interest because it provides information about the properties of individual recognition by testing its adaptability. For instance, in human infants, discrimination of faces is known to specialize during the first year of life for conspecifics or even more drastically for individuals of their own socio-ethnic group (22)(23)(24)(25). However, this faculty can be maintained with longer exposure to the other species or groups (e.g., ref.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous voice–face identity matching by rhesus monkeys for familiar conspecifics and humans

Sliwa

Duhamel

Pascalis

et al. 2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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115

102

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Recognition of a particular individual occurs when we reactivate links between current perceptual inputs and the previously formed representation of that person. This recognition can be achieved by identifying, separately or simultaneously, distinct elements such as the face, silhouette, or voice as belonging to one individual. In humans, those different cues are linked into one complex conceptual representation of individual identity. Here we tested whether rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) also have a cognitive representation of identity by evaluating whether they exhibit cross-modal individual recognition. Further, we assessed individual recognition of familiar conspecifics and familiar humans. In a free preferential looking time paradigm, we found that, for both species, monkeys spontaneously matched the faces of known individuals to their voices. This finding demonstrates that rhesus macaques possess a cross-modal cognitive representation of individuals that extends from conspecifics to humans, revealing the adaptive potential of identity recognition for individuals of socioecological relevance.cross-species | vocal communication | nonhuman primates | picture recognition I n humans, both faces and voices convey information about identity, providing some of the many cues we use to recognize individuals we know (1). The multifaceted nature of identity code suggests that a complex cognitive representation binds semantic information with information of different sensory modalities. In rhesus monkeys, however, it has typically been assessed only via single-modality information. For instance, rhesus monkeys can discriminate between calls of two conspecifics in a playback experiment using a spontaneous habituation-discrimination paradigm (2). They are also able to discriminate faces of two conspecifics in a match-to-sample task (3) and monkey faces or human faces in visual paired comparison tasks (4-6). These observations demonstrate that monkeys can discriminate idiosyncratic characteristics ("individual A is different from B") for their own or other species. However, they do not provide evidence of individual recognition ("this is individual A, this is B"). In comparison with discrimination, individual recognition requires an additional associative level that allows retrieval of information belonging to a specific individual. In rhesus monkeys, coarse recognition processes such as of their own species, kin, gender, reproductive status, or hierarchy are well documented (2, 7-12). However, these rudimentary recognition abilities fail to account for some sophisticated behaviors that are observed in rhesus macaques' societies. In particular, rhesus macaques live in large groups and maintain elaborate social relations involving, e.g., nonkin alliances during aggressive interactions, fight interference, reciprocal support, friendly grooming, and reconciliation (13-15). Such an organization would benefit well from the finest-grain individual recognition based on a cognitive multimodal representation of identity.Individu...

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Development of the other-race effect during infancy: Evidence toward universality?

Cited by 266 publications

References 38 publications

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable

Infants' knowledge of their own species

Spontaneous voice–face identity matching by rhesus monkeys for familiar conspecifics and humans

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