Lecture 3 - The Importance Of The Face For Social Interaction

Question 1

What are newly born infants able to do?

Answer 1

They are able to recognise faces e.g. distinguish their mothers face from others and discriminate different facial expressions

Question 2

Shortly after the newborn period what disappears between 1 and 2 months of age but then re-emerges between 2 and 3 months of age?

Answer 2

Preference for faces

Question 3

When newborn infants preference for faces temporarily disappears, what sort of behaviour do they exhibit?

Answer 3

They begin to scan but do not fixate on faces

Question 4

At what age do specific brain responses to faces start to develop and how are these responses measured?

Answer 4

3 months and are measured through event-related potentials (ERPs)

Question 5

6 month olds show two ERP components linked to face processing, what are they?

Answer 5

One of these responds to type of face (e.g. Human or animal) and the other responds to orientation of face (e.g. Upright vs inverted)

Question 6

Starting at around 4 months, what do infants begin to show?

Answer 6

A left visual field, right hemisphere advantage in face processing at which point cortical responses to faces become more localised

Question 7

By 9 months, what are infants able to do?

Answer 7

They can easily discriminate between human faces which suggests that their face processing abilities have become quite specialised

Question 8

What is a facial prototype?

Answer 8

A composite representation of faces that is developed from experience with faces which infants use as a reference when processing faces

Question 9

How are facial prototypes linked to specialised processing?

Answer 9

Faces that are closer to the prototype are easier to recognise

Question 10

What are infants are able to discriminate between and show preference for?

Answer 10

Female over male faces, attractive faces, happy facial expressions, own race faces (by 3 months), own species faces (by 9 months), faces over other objects, and normal faces over scrambled faces

Question 11

What are newborns born with a preference for?

Answer 11

Their mothers face

Question 12

How long after birth does an infant develop a preference for its mothers face?

Answer 12

4-5 hours after viewing

Question 13

What does Field (1985) suggest is the reason for this preference for the mothers face?

Answer 13

He suggests that it is an evolutionary adaptive process that ensures proximity between new horns and their mothers

Question 14

How does the pattern differ in newborns with depressed mothers?

Answer 14

New borns of depressed mothers take longer to habituate to their mothers face and show no preference for her face or a strangers face following habituation

Question 15

What is recognition of the mothers face dependent on?

Answer 15

The new born being able to see both the mothers external features such as her hairline and her internal features such as her eyes and nose

Question 16

At 6 months, infants show no difference in looking time between their mothers face and a strangers face when the two are paired together. True or false?

Answer 16

True

Question 17

What evidence is there to support recognition of the fathers face?

Answer 17

There is little evidence to support this

Question 18

At what age does the ability to recognise yourself in the mirror occur?

Answer 18

This ability emerges at 18-24 months

Question 19

When mirror self recognition first appears, what do infants show a preference for?

Answer 19

They show greater interest in their own face than in another persons

Question 20

What did Slater et al (1998) find about infants preference for attractiveness?

Answer 20

They found that infants preferred to look at attractive faces and looked longer at faces that were rated as attractive compared to unattractive

Question 21

What does prototype theory suggest about infants preference for types of face?

Answer 21

It suggests that individuals prefer prototypes which are defined as the central tendency or mean of a population. Facial configurations close to the average of the population should be considered attractive because they are more prototypical than faces that deviate from the average

Question 22

What is infants visual acuity like?

Answer 22

They are able to see small objects and in fine detail

Question 23

What is infants visual accommodation like?

Answer 23

They have good control over focusing the eyes

Question 24

What sort of information do infants generally tend to rely on when processing and recognising faces?

Answer 24

They rely on configural rather than featural information

Question 25

What are the 3 experimental methods in infant perception research?

Answer 25

Preferential looking/tracking, habituation and event-related potentials

Question 26

What is involved in the preferential looking task?

Answer 26

Infants are presented with two stimuli simultaneously and the looking time is measured. Preference is indicated by a longer looking time

Question 27

What is involved in the habituation task?

Answer 27

Expose infants to stimulus A until it becomes bored and then introduce stimulus B. Discrimination is indicated by looking time

Question 28

What is involved in the event-related potential task?

Answer 28

Measures brain response to visual stimuli. The discrimination of stimuli produces different brain wave patterns

Question 29

Why do infants show a preference for faces?

Answer 29

The perceptual system is specialised for faces, there is perceptual bias for top-heavy configurations and faces display stimulus characteristics that are appealing (Cassia et al, 2004)

Question 30

Johnson and Morton (1991) argue that faces are special and they identify two systems. What are they?

Answer 30

System 1 is the CONSPEC system which orients infants to moving, face-like stimuli which declines between 1-3 months, and system 2 is the CONLERN system which is more sophisticated and takes over at around 2 months

Question 31

Turati (2004) argues that faces are not special. What does suggest about face-specific mechanisms?

Answer 31

He argues that there is no face-specific mechanism for face processing and that specialised face processing instead develops over time due to the high exposure and meaningfulness of faces

Question 32

What is intermodal matching?

Answer 32

The matching of a voice and a face

Question 33

What is social referencing?

Answer 33

Using a caregivers emotional cues about how to react in a novel situation e.g. A mother smiling at someone indicates that they are safe to approach

Question 34

At what age do researchers suggest infants are able to categorise emotions?

Answer 34

4-6 months

Question 35

At what age do infants begin to look far more frequently at the eye region of faces and what is its importance?

Answer 35

At around 2 months, and this plays an important role in the development of their social bond

Question 36

What is involved in the still face situation?

Answer 36

The mother and infant play together for several minutes and the mother then poses with an expressionless face for several minutes which is then followed by a reunion session during which the mother and the infant play together again to restore normal interaction

Question 37

What behaviour do infants display during the still face period of the still face situation experiment?

Answer 37

Most infants display neutral effect, although some infants respond with protest and negative effect