Perceptual Development: Face Perception

Newborn Face Perception Abilities

Newborn infants, just a few minutes from birth, will track with their eyes a schematic visual stimulus resembling a face more than they will track a stimulus that has the external shape of the head but has the internal features of the face scrambled. This result supports the idea that newborn infants enter the world with an internal representation of a face, although some have suggested that the information in the representation may be relatively coarse, consisting of three high-contrast blobs in the correct relative locations for the eyes and the mouth, framed in the contour of a head shape. The coarseness of the representation has actually led to the notion that the newborn representation is not necessarily specialized for faces, but that it reflects a preference for more general perceptual properties (such as symmetry, top heaviness, and congruence) that may also be present in nonface objects. However, the possibility that the initial face representation may be more elaborate is suggested by the finding that newborn infants will imitate facial gestures (such as mouth opening and tongue protrusion) that they see an adult modeling. Whether derived from specialized or more general processes, the newborn representation is believed to equip infants with a mechanism that biases visual attention to the face information present in a visual display. This mechanism may be viewed as adaptive in terms of allowing infants to attend to and recognize members of their own species and also specific people, such as the primary caregiver.

Development of Face Perception in the First Year

If infants have an initial representation of a face as a set of features in a particular arrangement, then the question arises as to how sensitivity develops to the individual features versus sensitivity to the [Page 743]structural whole that incorporates the spatial relations among the features. In addition, for structural processing, there is the question of how infants come to process first-order relations (i.e., categorical spatial relations—the eyes above the nose) and second-order relations (i.e., metric spatial relations—the distance between the eyes and the nose). The expertise that adults have for processing faces is believed to be associated with sensitivity to second-order relations. Initial sensitivity to both first- and second-order relations is present in infancy, although full development of sensitivity to second-order relations to adultlike levels may follow a protracted course lasting even into adolescence.

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