How face specialization emerges in the first months of life

Simion, Francesca; Leo, Irene; Turati, Chiara; Valenza, Eloisa; Barba, Beatrice Dalla

doi:10.1016/s0079-6123(07)64009-6

Cited by 114 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…Such findings have been interpreted as showing that even newborns have the ability to detect faces. However, there is considerable debate as to whether this preference in newborns reflects face-specific or more general processing mechanisms (for a review, see Simion, Leo, Turati, Valenza, & Dalla Barba, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of Mooney faces by young infants: The role of local feature visibility, contrast polarity, and motion

Otsuka

Hill

Kanazawa

et al. 2012

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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We examined the ability of young infants (3- and 4-month-olds) to detect faces in the two-tone images often referred to as Mooney faces. In Experiment 1, this performance was examined in conditions of high and low visibility of local features and with either the presence or absence of the outer head contour. We found that regardless of the presence of the outer head contour, infants preferred upright over inverted two-tone face images only when local features were highly visible (Experiment 1a). We showed that this upright preference disappeared when the contrast polarity of two-tone images was reversed (Experiment 1b), reflecting operation of face-specific mechanisms. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether motion affects infants' perception of faces in Mooney faces. We found that when the faces appeared to be rigidly moving, infants did show an upright preference in conditions of low visibility of local features (Experiment 2a). Again the preference disappeared when the contrast polarity of the image was reversed (Experiment 2b). Together, these results suggest that young infants have the ability to integrate fragmented image features to perceive faces from two-tone face images, especially if they are moving. This suggests that an interaction between motion and form rather than a purely motion-based process (e.g., structure from motion) facilitates infants' perception of faces in ambiguous two-tone images.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of Mooney faces by young infants: The role of local feature visibility, contrast polarity, and motion

Otsuka

Hill

Kanazawa

et al. 2012

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…A face is a salient stimulus conveying crucial information for social interactions and several lines of evidence have suggested that human faces capture attention much more than other stimulus categories (see Palermo & Rhodes, 2007 for review): developmental studies have shown that newborns and infants track faces preferentially over scrambled faces and inverted faces (Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991;; but see Simion, Leo, Turati, Valenza, & Dalla Barba, 2007). Moreover, patients with hemispatial visual neglect are more sensitive to faces in their neglected hemifield than to other stimuli (Vuilleumier, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking away from faces: Influence of high-level visual processes on saccade programming

Morand

2010

JOV

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Human faces capture attention more than other visual stimuli. Here we investigated whether such face-specific biases rely on automatic (involuntary) or voluntary orienting responses. To this end, we used an anti-saccade paradigm, which requires the ability to inhibit a reflexive automatic response and to generate a voluntary saccade in the opposite direction of the stimulus. To control for potential low-level confounds in the eye-movement data, we manipulated the high-level visual properties of the stimuli while normalizing their global low-level visual properties. Eye movements were recorded in 21 participants who performed either pro-or anti-saccades to a face, car, or noise pattern, randomly presented to the left or right of a fixation point. For each trial, a symbolic cue instructed the observer to generate either a pro-saccade or an antisaccade. We report a significant increase in anti-saccade error rates for faces compared to cars and noise patterns, as well as faster pro-saccades to faces and cars in comparison to noise patterns. These results indicate that human faces induce stronger involuntary orienting responses than other visual objects, i.e., responses that are beyond the control of the observer. Importantly, this involuntary processing cannot be accounted for by global low-level visual factors.

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“…Studies of selective attention have shown that between birth and 6 mo of age infants first attend more to the eyes and later less so but never more to the mouth. For example, even though newborns do not respond to faces as communicatively and socially meaningful objects (12), they look more at the eye region (13). Older, 3-11-wk-old, infants also look more at the eyes and, even when they hear the face talking, they still look 10 times longer at the eyes than at the mouth (14).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech

Lewkowicz

Hansen-Tift

2012

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

421

591

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The mechanisms underlying the acquisition of speech-production ability in human infancy are not well understood. We tracked 4-12-mo-old English-learning infants' and adults' eye gaze while they watched and listened to a female reciting a monologue either in their native (English) or nonnative (Spanish) language. We found that infants shifted their attention from the eyes to the mouth between 4 and 8 mo of age regardless of language and then began a shift back to the eyes at 12 mo in response to native but not nonnative speech. We posit that the first shift enables infants to gain access to redundant audiovisual speech cues that enable them to learn their native speech forms and that the second shift reflects growing native-language expertise that frees them to shift attention to the eyes to gain access to social cues. On this account, 12-mo-old infants do not shift attention to the eyes when exposed to nonnative speech because increasing native-language expertise and perceptual narrowing make it more difficult to process nonnative speech and require them to continue to access redundant audiovisual cues. Overall, the current findings demonstrate that the development of speech production capacity relies on changes in selective audiovisual attention and that this depends critically on early experience.human infants | multisensory perception | speech acquisition | cognitive development

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How face specialization emerges in the first months of life

Cited by 114 publications

References 74 publications

Perception of Mooney faces by young infants: The role of local feature visibility, contrast polarity, and motion

Perception of Mooney faces by young infants: The role of local feature visibility, contrast polarity, and motion

Looking away from faces: Influence of high-level visual processes on saccade programming

Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech

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