The Role of Person Familiarity in Young Infants' Perception of Emotional Expressions

Kahana-Kalman, Ronit; Walker-Andrews, Arlene S.

doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00283

Cited by 155 publications

(163 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…As a result, we predicted that young infants would match monkey faces and voices, but that older infants would not. This finding would differ markedly from previous findings showing that infants can match human faces and voices as early as 2 months of age and as late as 12 months of age (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8).…”

contrasting

confidence: 99%

“…In order for them to have veridical and meaningful social experiences with such people, infants must be able to integrate particular faces and voices by detecting their correspondences. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that, beginning as early as 2 months of age, infants begin to exhibit the ability to perceive face-voice correspondences (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). Despite this fact, however, the developmental process underlying intersensory integration of faces and voices, as well as more general intersensory processes, remain poorly understood.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Lewkowicz

Ghazanfar

2006

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

140

175

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Between 6 and 10 months of age, infants become better at discriminating among native voices and human faces and worse at discriminating among nonnative voices and other species' faces. We tested whether these unisensory perceptual narrowing effects reflect a general ontogenetic feature of perceptual systems by testing across sensory modalities. We showed pairs of monkey faces producing two different vocalizations to 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old infants and asked whether they would prefer to look at the corresponding face when they heard one of the two vocalizations. Only the two youngest groups exhibited intersensory matching, indicating that perceptual narrowing is pan-sensory and a fundamental feature of perceptual development.crossmodal ͉ face processing ͉ multisensory F rom the moment of birth, infants find themselves in a socially rich environment where they see and hear other people. In order for them to have veridical and meaningful social experiences with such people, infants must be able to integrate particular faces and voices by detecting their correspondences. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that, beginning as early as 2 months of age, infants begin to exhibit the ability to perceive face-voice correspondences (1-8). Despite this fact, however, the developmental process underlying intersensory integration of faces and voices, as well as more general intersensory processes, remain poorly understood. Current theoretical views assume either that basic intersensory perceptual abilities are present at birth and become increasingly differentiated and refined over age (9) or that such abilities are not present at birth and only emerge gradually during the first years of life as a result of the child's active exploration of the world (10, 11).Most empirical evidence supports the former, differentiation, view in showing that basic intersensory perceptual abilities are already present in infancy and that as infants grow these abilities change and improve in significant ways (12, 13). For example, young human infants can perceive lower-order intersensory relations based on such attributes as intensity (14), temporal synchrony (15, 16), and duration (17), but do not integrate auditory and visual spatial cues (18). In contrast, older infants can perceive higher-order intersensory relations based on such attributes as affect (6) and gender (3), become capable of learning arbitrary intersensory associations (19) and can integrate auditory and visual spatial cues (18). Findings from studies of underlying neural mechanisms of intersensory integration in cats and rhesus monkeys show a similar pattern. Whereas multisensory cells in the superior colliculus of adult cats and rhesus monkeys integrate auditory and visual cues in spatial localization tasks, these cells do not integrate them in neonatal cats and monkeys (20,21). Together, extant findings suggest a general developmental pattern consisting of the initial emergence of low-level intersensory abilities, a subsequent agedependent refinement and improvement ...

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confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Lewkowicz

Ghazanfar

2006

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

140

175

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“…Other findings suggest that discrimination of emotional expressions may be sensitive to early contextual information. For example, in one study, 3.5-month-old infants discriminated between happy or sad facial expressions (accompanied by affectively matching vocal expressions) only if the emotional expressions were displayed by their own mother in the experimental settings [174] (also see [175]). Taken together these findings suggest that during the first months of life, processing of facial expressions of emotion is at a rudimentary level, and may be sensitive to familiarity with the facial identity.…”

Section: Development Of Facial Emotion Recognition In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autism and the development of face processing

Golarai

Grill-Spector

Reiss

2006

Clinical Neuroscience Research

154

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Autism is a pervasive developmental condition, characterized by impairments in non-verbal communication, social relationships and stereotypical patterns of behavior. A large body of evidence suggests that several aspects of face processing are impaired in autism, including anomalies in gaze processing, memory for facial identity and recognition of facial expressions of emotion. In search of neural markers of anomalous face processing in autism, much interest has focused on a network of brain regions that are implicated in social cognition and face processing. In this review, we will focus on three such regions, namely the STS for its role in processing gaze and facial movements, the FFA in face detection and identification and the amygdala in processing facial expressions of emotion. Much evidence suggests that a better understanding of the normal development of these specialized regions is essential for discovering the neural bases of face processing anomalies in autism. Thus, we will also examine the available literature on the normal development of face processing. Key unknowns in this research area are the neuro-developmental processes, the role of experience and the interactions among components of the face processing system in shaping each of the specialized regions for processing faces during normal development and in autism. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.

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“…Whether an infant perceives an emotional expression and responds to it depends on the age of the infant, the expression that is being enacted, the task by which the experimenter measures perception, the definition of perception (detection, discrimination, recognition, understanding), and the context in which the expression is encountered (Walker-Andrews 1997). Infants as young as three months show intermodal matching for their mothers' happy and sad facial-vocal expressions, but not for expressions posed by a female stranger (Kahana-Kalman & Walker-Andrews 2001) Similarly, infants show intermodal matching for fathers' happy and sad facial-vocal expressions only when they have highly involved fathers (Montague & Walker-Andrews 2002). Lest one think that this is because infants are merely exposed to maternal expressions more than paternal expressions, refer to research by Dunn and colleagues (Dunn et al 1991a; that illustrates the importance of the family context and interactions in the perception of emotion by children.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

2004

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Abstract:Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991;. It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction.Keywords: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein et al. 1998;Symons & Clark 2000), mothers' education (Cutting & Dunn 1999), and socioeconomic circumstances (Holmes et al. 1996).Furthermore, a number of studies have found correlations between language and social understanding (e.g., Cutting & Dunn 1999; de Villers 2000; Happé 1995;Jenkins & Astington 1996). In longitudinal studies, forms of family talk about mental states have been found to be related to later success on false belief tests (e.g., Brown et al. 1996;Dunn et al. 1991a;Ruffman et al. 2002). In addition, mothers who think of their children in mentalistic terms ("mindmindedness"), and therefore, presumably talk to their children about the psychological world, have children who are more advanced in understanding beliefs than are other children (Meins & Fernyhough 1999;Meins et al. 1998). Similar correlations between family interaction and the development of children's understanding of emotions have also been reported (e.g., Dunn et al. 1991b;Hooven et al. 1995;Kuebli et al. 1995;Steele et al. 1999). In a longitudinal study, Astington and Jenkins (1999) found that earlier language abilities predict later false belief performance but earlier false belief competence does not predict later language abilities, supporting the conclusion that language is important in social cognitive development.Another source of evidence that social interaction is important for the development of a mentalistic understanding comes from research with deaf children. A number o...

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The Role of Person Familiarity in Young Infants' Perception of Emotional Expressions

Cited by 155 publications

References 89 publications

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Autism and the development of face processing

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

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