How experience influences infants’ recognition of male and female faces

2018

Infants' perceptual abilities allow them to distinguish faces of different races and genders from an early age (for a review, see Pascalis et al., 2011). However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current dissertation examined this issue by testing whether 12and 24-month-old infants represent faces of different races and genders as distinct 'kinds' or instead as variations of a single broader category (e.g., 'human face'). The current dissertation included two experiments each with a different type of violation-ofexpectation individuation paradigm. Experiment 1 used a passive viewing looking-time measure to establish infants' baseline response to human-vs. non-human faces as well as their response to male versus female faces. Results from Experiment 1 replicated previous looking time measures and found evidence that 12-month-old infants have a representation for an ontological or 'human' kind. Using a manual search paradigm, infants' face individuation based on gender and race was assessed in Experiment 2. Twenty-four-month-old infants, but not younger infants, displayed reaching behaviors viii that indicated they individuated faces based on the kind 'human' as well as face gender. There was no evidence of individuation based on a face's race group. The current findings help to determine how infants begin to conceptually represent gender and race differences as identity-defining variations that might serve as a starting point for sociocognitive biases observed later in development. ix

Journal of Vision, 2010

2010

faces in a broader set of categories than older infants, with older infants being worse at discriminating between faces belonging to infrequently encountered categories. Perceptual narrowing results demonstrate that experience shapes selectivity during infancy, leading to profound perceptual consequences. The fi rst year of life (specifi cally the 6-to 9-month age range) is thus a critically important time period for studying how distinctions are made between faces and non-face control stimuli, as well as between distinct categories of faces defi ned at varying levels of granularity. Our aim in the present study was to characterize how distinct types of face selectivity may interact during this period of development. This is distinct from any effort to characterize true perceptual narrowing, but shares the same broad goal of perceptual narrowing research insofar as we wish to more fully understand the developmental timecourse of differential processing for various kinds of faces and face-like stimuli. Specifi cally, we ask how differential processing of faces at a subordinate level (personally familiar vs. unfamiliar face) may lead to differential processing at a basic level (face vs. inverted face). What do we mean when we say that faces may be distinguished at different levels of granularity or "scales?" Intuitively, we suggest that degrees of face selectivity can be considered hierarchically. A coarse face processing strategy (that is not very selective) may only differentiate between faces and non-faces (such as inverted, photo-negative or distorted faces (Figure 1, top row). A more sophisticated and selective representation may distinguish between face categories on the basis of species, gender, race, or age (Figure 1, middle row). Finally, a very sophisticated representation of facial appearance may be able to make distinctions between individual exemplars within a category. This naïve ontology is

Infant Behavior and Development, 1979

The features of a face which define its age or sex appear to play a more important role than do the number of simple feature differences between like aged or same sex faces in the 5-to 6-month infant's recognition of face photos. The present study explored the influence of the number of simple feature differences among faces on the 5-to 6-month infant's ability to recognize photographs. Recognition was measured by the infant's visual preference for novel targets, a behavior typically occurring by two months of age (Fagan, Fantz, & Miranda, April 197 I). The extent of similarity among faces was estimated by having adult judges rate face photos on the basis of specific features which have been found to provide distinctive, relevant, and relatively independent cues for both adult and computer identification of faces (Goldstein, Harmon, & Lesk, 1971). Infants at 5 to 6 months will devote more fixation to a new than to a previously exposed face photo as long as the faces vary in age or in sex. Thus, a man can be discriminated from a woman or a man from a baby; but there is little evidence of such recognition when, for example, one man is to be discriminated from another (Fagan, 1978). To assume, however, that infants are basing their identification of a previously seen face on those features or combinations of features which define the sex or age of a face for the adult may or may not be warranted. Adult males, for example, tend to have full heads of hair, defined eyebrows, and oval faces, while babies are bald and more round faced than'are men: These simple feature differences in hair length or outline form alone may be sufficient to account for the 5-to 6-month infant's ability to recognize whether he

Infant Behavior and Development

At 3–4 months of age, infants respond to gender information in human faces. Specifically,young infants display a visual preference toward female over male faces. In three experiments, using a visual preference task, we investigated the role of hairline information in this bias. In Experiment 1, we presented male and female composite faces with similar hairstyles to 4-month-olds and observed a preference for female faces. In Experiment 2, the faces were presented, but in this instance, without hairline cues, and the preference was eliminated.In Experiment 3, using the same cropping to eliminate hairline cues, but with feminized female faces and masculinized male faces, infants’ preference toward female faces was still not in evidence. The findings show that hairline information is important in young infants’preferential orientation toward female faces.

Developmental Psychology, 2015

Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study, 5-month-olds exhibited a preference between sex congruent (face and body of the same sex) versus sex-incongruent (face and body belonging to different genders) images. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to exhibit a preference. Thus, 5month-olds process sex information from bodies and match it to facial information. However, younger infants' failure to match suggests that there is a developmental change between 3.5 and 5 months of age in the processing of sex categories. These results indicate that rapid developmental changes lead to fairly sophisticated social information processing quite early in life.

Infant Behavior and Development, 2011

Newborn infants prefer to look at a new face compared to a known face (still-face). This effect does not happen with the mother-face. The newborns could be attracted by the mother-face because, unlike the still-face, it confirms an expectation of communication. Fifty newborns were video-recorded. Sixteen of them were recruited in the final sample: nine were exposed to a communicative face and seven to a still-face. All the 16 newborns were successively exposed to two preference-tasks where a new face was compared with the known face. Only newborns previously exposed to a still-face preferred to look at a new face instead of the known face. The results suggest that the newborns are able to build a dynamic representation of faces.

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016

ABSTRACT Much research has documented how people’s face preferences vary, but we do not know whether there is a specific sensitive period during development when some individual differences in face preferences become established. This study investigates which specific developmental phases may be instrumental in forming individual differences in face preferences in adulthood. The study design is based on the established finding that people tend to be attracted to facial features that resemble those of their other-sex parent, particularly if they report a close childhood relationship with that parent. Accordingly, if individual differences in adult facial preferences (specifically, preferences for faces that resemble one’s parents) are formed during specific developmental stages, then only the quality of the parental relationship in those stages should predict adult preferences for facial features that resemble one’s parents. Adult participants reported the emotional support received from their parents during three different developmental phases and at the current time, and they reported the hair and eye colour of their ideal and actual partner, and their parents and selves. The study found that a woman’s retrospectively reported greater emotional support from her mother or father after menarche predicted significantly stronger preferences for partners whose eye colour was closer to that of the parent. In contrast, emotional support prior to menarche predicted greater dissimilarity between the eye colour of the parent and a woman’s preferred partner. These results indicate a possible interplay of positive and negative sexual imprinting that may arise from adaptations to promote optimal outbreeding. The study also found that parental hair colour, and in particular maternal hair colour, predicted women’s preferences for hair colour in a partner, although this may have been driven by ethnic group matching. The results of the study suggest that experiences during specific childhood and adolescent developmental periods may have longstanding effects on individual differences in human facial preferences.

PloS one, 2011

Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different ways to those features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protruding cheeks, colloquially described as 'cute'. We investigated experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal ('liking') and behavioural responsivity ('wanting') to real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave significantly higher 'liking' ratings for infant faces (but not adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the 'wanting' task, where we measured the willingness of men and women to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the 'cutest' infants. We suggest that infant faces may have similar motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their conscious appraisal.

Developmental Science, 2008

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three-to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not arise from low-level image differences ). In addition, the spontaneous preference for attractive tiger faces influenced performance in a recognition memory task involving attractive versus unattractive tiger face pairings (Experiment 4). The findings suggest that infant preference for attractive faces reflects the activity of general processing mechanisms rather than a specific adaptation to mate choice.

2022

Face pareidolia is the experience of seeing illusory faces in inanimate objects. While children experience face pareidolia, it is unknown whether they perceive gender in illusory faces, as their face evaluation system is still developing in the first decade of life. In a sample of 412 children and adults from 4 to 80 years of age we found that like adults, children perceived many illusory faces in objects to have a gender and had a strong bias to see them as male rather than female, regardless of their own gender identification. These results provide evidence that the male bias for face pareidolia emerges early in life, even before the ability to discriminate gender from facial cues alone is fully developed. Further, the existence of a male bias in children suggests that any social context that elicits the cognitive bias to see faces as male has remained relatively consistent across generations.

Developmental Psychology, 2002

1. Three experiments investigated whether the presence of more elements in the upper part of a configuration (ie, up-down asymmetry) plays a role in determining newborns' preference for facelike patterns. Newborns preferred a nonfacelike stimulus with more ...

Cognitive Development, 2001

We tested the ability of 1-and 3-month-old infants to form prototypic representations of faces. Following familiarization to four individual faces, both 1-and 3-month-olds showed evidence of recognizing the individual faces but only 3-month-olds showed evidence of recognizing, and thus having mentally computed, the average of the four face stimuli. Additional experiments showed that (a) 1-month-olds failed to show evidence of recognizing the average face even when the test was made easier, and (b) the results could not be attributed to preexisting visual preferences among the faces. These results are discussed in relation to a two-process theory of the development of face recognition and the hypothesis that babies' abilities to form prototypes of faces underlies their visual responsiveness to attractive faces.

Developmental Psychology, 1991

Three studies examined infant preferences for attractive faces in four types of faces: White adult male and female faces, Black adult female faces, and infant faces. Infants viewed pairs of faces, previously rated for attractiveness by adults, in a visual preference paradigm. Significant preferences were found for attractive faces across all facial types. The results confirm earlier reports of this phenomenon and extend those results by showing that infant preferences for attractive faces generalize across faces differing in race, gender, and age. Two potential explanations for these observed infant preferences are discussed.

Frontiers in Psychology

In an increasingly multicultural society, the way people perceive individuals from the same vs different ethnic groups greatly affects their own and societal well-being. Two psychological effects that influence these perceptions are the Mere-Exposure Effect (MRE), wherein familiarity with certain objects or persons suffices for people to develop a preference for them, and the Baby Schema (BS), a set of specific facial features that evokes caregiving behaviors and an affective orientation in adults. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether these two effects play a role in implicit physiological responses to babies vs. adults faces belonging to participants in-group vs. out-group. In study 1, the pupillary diameter of 62 Caucasian participants (M = 31; F = 31) who observed adult and infant faces of different ethnic groups (Caucasian, Chinese) was measured. In study 2, brain waves of 38 Caucasian participants (M = 19; F = 19), who observed the same set of faces, were recorded using EEG. In both studies, adults explicit preferences (i.e., attitudes) toward faces were assessed using questionnaires. In Study 1, females showed greater attention to infant than adult faces (BS effect) in both pupils, regardless of the ethnic group of the face. By contrast, males attended to infant more than adult faces for out-group faces only (BS effect). In Study 2, greater left posterior-parietal alpha activation toward out-group compared to in-group adult faces was found in males (MRE). Participants with a low BS effect toward in-group baby faces exhibited greater left posterior alpha activation to out-group than in-group baby faces (MRE). These findings reveal how different levels of sensitivity to in-group infants may moderate perceptions of both in-group and out-group baby faces. Questionnaire measures on attitudes showed that males and females preferred in-group to out-group adult faces (MRE). Participants in Study 2 also reported a greater preference for infants than adults faces (BS effect). These findings explicate the roles of gender and the Baby Schema effect in moderating implicit processing of in-group and out-group faces, despite their lack in moderating explicit reports. Contradictory findings at the implicit (physiological) and explicit (self-report) levels suggest that differential processing of faces may occur at a non-conscious level.