Infants rapidly detect human faces in complex naturalistic visual scenes

Abstract

Infants respond preferentially to faces and face‐like stimuli from birth, but past research has typically presented faces in isolation or amongst an artificial array of competing objects. In the current study infants aged 3‐ to 12‐months viewed a series of complex visual scenes; half of the scenes contained a person, the other half did not. Infants rapidly detected and oriented to faces in scenes even when they were not visually salient. Although a clear developmental improvement was observed in face detection and interest, all infants displayed sensitivity to the presence of a person in a scene, by displaying eye movements that differed quantifiably across a range of measures when viewing scenes that either did or did not contain a person. We argue that infant's face detection capabilities are ostensibly “better” with naturalistic stimuli and artificial array presentations used in previous studies have underestimated performance.

Caucasian Infants’ Attentional Orienting to Own- and Other-Race Faces

“…ANCOVAs were conducted with Age and FaceRace as categorical variables and Distance as a continuous variable. The face detection ANCOVA yielded a main effect of Distance (F(1, 38) = 21.481, p < 0.001, ŋp 2 = 0.361), with faces closer to the screen Following Gluckman and Johnson [14] and Kelly et al [19], the percentage of first-looks to face AOIs were computed to assess whether faces had been prioritised over other information contained within each scene. Unlike in the adult literature (e.g., [6]) where the contributions of bottom-up and top-down factors have been studied extensively, it is currently unclear how these factors influence infant looking, thus no location on the screen was considered more or less likely than any other location to attract the initial fixation.…”

“…A recent study reported that infants aged three-to twelve-months show consistent detection (as measured via first-look orienting) of faces in complex real-world scenes. This suggests that infant face orienting might be improved within naturalistic scenes compared to more artificial presentations [19], highlighting the role of context and visual experience in guiding fixations toward salient objects such as faces.Although a picture of the development of infant biases for face orienting and attention holding is emerging, no study to date has actively investigated whether these abilities differ according to stimulus race. This is surprising given infant preferences and recognition abilities for own-and other-race stimuli have been extensively studied see [20] for a recent review.…”

“…A recent study reported that infants aged three-to twelve-months show consistent detection (as measured via first-look orienting) of faces in complex real-world scenes. This suggests that infant face orienting might be improved within naturalistic scenes compared to more artificial presentations [19], highlighting the role of context and visual experience in guiding fixations toward salient objects such as faces.…”

“…This is surprising given infant preferences and recognition abilities for own-and other-race stimuli have been extensively studied see [20] for a recent review. For instance, we know that while newborn infants are insensitive to race [21,22], by three months of age they show spontaneous preferences for own-race faces [21,23,24], and their ability to discriminate between other-race faces declines across the first year [2][3][4]6,9,10,[12][13][14][15][16]18,19,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].Moreover, from six months of age, infants begin to categorise faces according to race [25,36], and by nine months infants show a broad categorisation of different classes of other-race faces within habituation-response paradigms. For example, Caucasian infants viewed African and Asian faces according to a single 'other' category [36].…”

“…We define attention capture (i.e., orienting) as the time taken to orient to a face following stimulus presentation onset and we define attention holding as the percentage of time spent looking at the face once it has been fixated. Additionally, following Kelly et al [19], we will also investigate if there are any racial asymmetries in face detection, which we define as the number of instances (i.e., trials) in which the infant's first saccade is directed to the face following stimulus onset.…”