Lecture 9 -

Question 1

Why is it that infants look at faces of their own race, female faces, and attractive rather than unattractive faces in their first few months of life?

Answer 1

Natural preference

Question 2

Why is face perception important?

Answer 2

• Recognition of caregivers/attachment figures

- Knowing who to approach and avoid

Question 3

What is the evidence of early face recognition in infants?

Answer 3

Walton et al., (1992) - after 1-4 days, the mothers face can be distinguished from an unfamiliar female’s face.

Field et al., (1993) - Newborns can discriminate between different facial expressions (so know who to approach and avoid)

Question 4

What did Farroni et al., (2002) study and find about which faces infants prefer to look at?

Answer 4

Eye gaze. Infants as young as 72 hours were shown pictures of faces where the eyes were either facing the infant or not.

Infants looked longer at faces where eyes where pointing towards them. Preference for eye gaze.

Question 5

What did Field et al., (2002) find about the infants of depressive mothers and face recognition?

Answer 5

Got infants to habituate to their mother’s face and then showed them a strangers face.

Typically, in infants with non-depressive mothers, infant looked more at the strangers face because it was novel.
However, infants with depressive mothers showed no difference in looking, suggesting they could not discriminate their own mothers face.

Implies that depressive mothers give their infants less eye contact, decreasing the amount of looking that infants give them.

Question 6

What did Di Giorgio et al., (2012) find about the facial preferences of newborns (neonates)?

Answer 6

Newborns distinguish between:

• Faces and other objects
• Normal faces over scrambled faces
• Upright faces over inverted faces
• no preference for human over monkey faces

Question 7

What did De Haan et al., (2002) propose about how infants are able to make such early and efficient facial processing?

Answer 7

• Do not have the same mechanisms as adults for detecting faces. Adults have specialised N170 - infants have a version of this which is the same in shape, but not the same in activity/behaviour (De Haan et al., 2002).

Question 8

What did Johnson and Morton (1991) propose about how infants are able to make such early and efficient facial processing?

Answer 8

• Johnson and Morton (1991) proposed infants have two different systems for facial processing. The first is called CONSPEC and orients them to moving, face-like stimuli. The second is more complex, CONLERN, which enables them to detect more specific differences between faces, after around 2 months.

Question 9

What did Turati (2004) propose about how infants are able to make such early and efficient facial processing?

Answer 9

• Turati (2004) proposed that early face perception is due to a broader perceptual bias to look at stimuli that are top-heavy.

Question 10

What are the 3 main ideas about why infants are able to process faces so well so early in life?

Answer 10

• They have an innate, specialised, face detecting mechanism much the same that adults do.
• They have an innate representation of faces
• They have an immature visual system that is only sensitive to stimuli that has certain structural properties (top heavy)

Question 11

What is perceptual narrowing?

Answer 11

We come to prefer faces that we see most often, and therefore process faces like the ones we see most often, more efficiently (Scott et al., 2007)
This leads to formation of face prototypes and demonstrates malleability of the face processing system.

Question 12

What is the visual paired comparison technique?

Answer 12

Habituating participants to one face and then displaying a novel face. If they recognise the new face as novel, they will spend more time looking at it than the face they habituated to.

Question 13

What did Pascalis et al., (2002) find about the ability of older and younger infants to discriminate between human and monkey faces and what is the explanation for this?

Answer 13

Older infants (9 months +) and adults were poorer at distinguishing between monkey faces than distinguishing between human faces.

Younger infants (6 months) showed recognition for both human and monkey faces.

This suggests that the face processing system in older infants and adults had already begun to specialise with human faces, whereas younger infants were still working with the rudimentary ‘inverted triangle’ face processing system.

Question 14

What is one possible reason that infants prefer to look at female faces?

Answer 14

Perceptual narrowing - infants have more female faces in their environment, so get better at processing them.

Question 15

What did Rennels et al., (2017) find about preferences of infants to look at female faces?

Answer 15

The preference to look at female faces was eradicated in infants who received distributed (equal) caregiving from mother and father.

Question 16

What is the research that supports claims ‘they all look the same to me’ that people make about others of different races?

Answer 16

Gaither et al., (2012) - ability to discriminate between novel and familiar black faces was lost in Caucasian infants between the ages of 5 and 9 months.

Supports perceptual narrowing idea that faces you are exposed to shape your face perception system.