Olivier Pascalis

Grenoble-CNRS · LPNC UMR CNRS 5105

Dominance is a major organizing principle of human societies that impacts a wide range of human behaviors, from gaze-following to voting choices. Here, we examined how dominance modulates a fundamental perceptual ability: the perception of proximity. We used the "Fat Face" illusion, a novel paradigm that measures perceived proximity implicitly. The...

Dominance is a major organizing principle of human societies that impacts a wide range of human behaviors, from gaze-following to voting choices. Here, we examined how dominance modulates a fundamental perceptual ability: the perception of proximity. We used the “Fat Face” illusion, a novel paradigm that measures perceived proximity implicitly. The...

To prevent the spread of COVID‐19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess ho...

This study examined 3.5- and 6-month-old infants’ visual preferences for individuals from different age groups: adults versus infants. Unlike previous studies that only studied faces, here we included bodies, which are as frequent as faces in our environment, and highly salient, and in consequence, may play a role in identifying social categories a...

Faces can be categorized along various dimensions including gender or race, an ability developing in infancy. Infant categorization studies have focused on facial attributes in isolation, but the interaction between these attributes remains poorly understood. Experiment 1 examined gender categorization of other‐race faces in 9‐ and 12‐month‐old Whi...

Converging evidence has demonstrated our remarkable capacities to process individual faces. However, in real-life contexts, we rarely see faces in isolation. It is largely unknown how our visual system processes a multitude of faces. The current study explored this question by using the “Fat Face” illusion: when two identical faces are vertically a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to make the wearing of masks mandatory in the public space to limit the spread of the Coronavirus throughout the world. The implementation of such a health measure has raised many concerns and questions among the general population. What does research on this issue show? Recent research, which has been...

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant’s ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as prese...

The current study examined the influence of everyday perceptual experience with infant and child faces on the shaping of visual biases for faces in 3.5-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with pairs of photographs of unfamiliar child and infant faces. Four groups with differential experience with infant and c...

The abilities to identify individuals within the group, and to interpret their expressions and intentions are essential for many social animals. Face recognition in human and nonhuman primates stems from a conjunction of evolutionary inheritance and experience via exposure to faces present in the environment. Individuation is clearly a vital mechan...

During their first year, infants attune to the faces and language(s) that are frequent in their environment. The present study investigates the impact of language familiarity on how French‐learning 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds recognize own‐race faces. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with the talking face of a Caucasian bilingual German‐French s...

During real-life interactions, facial expressions of emotion are perceived dynamically with multimodal sensory information. In the absence of auditory sensory channel inputs, it is unclear how facial expressions are recognised and internally represented by deaf individuals. Few studies have investigated facial expression recognition in deaf signers...

Prior research has reported developmental change in how infants represent categories of other-race faces (Developmental Science 19 (2016) 362–371). In particular, Caucasian 6-month-olds were shown to represent African versus Asian face categories, whereas Caucasian 9 month-olds represented different classes of other-race faces in one category, incl...

A range of empirical and theoretical perspectives on the relationship between biology and social cognition from infancy through childhood. Recent research on the developmental origins of the social mind supports the view that social cognition is present early in infancy and childhood in surprisingly sophisticated forms. Developmental psychologists...

Most prior studies of the other-race categorization advantage have been conducted in predominantly monoracial societies. This limitation has left open the question of whether tendencies to more rapidly and accurately categorize other-race faces reflect social categorization (own-race vs. other-race) or perceptual expertise (frequent exposure vs. in...

The existence of critical or sensitive periods has been argued for cognitive functions such as language, which allows for communication with conspecifics. Faces also play a crucial role in establishing social communication. Here we discuss if critical or sensitive period concepts apply to face processing. We describe how experience shapes face proc...

In the context of word learning, it is commonly assumed that repetition is required for young children to form and maintain in memory an association between a novel word and its corresponding object. For instance, at 2 years of age, children are able to disambiguate word-related situations in one shot but are not able to further retain this newly a...

A body of research is reviewed that has investigated how infants respond to social category information in faces based on differential experience. Whereas some aspects of behavioral performance (visual preference, discrimination, and scanning) are consistent with traditional models of perceptual development (induction, maintenance, and attunement),...

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White...

Infants and adults look longer at faces that have been rated attractive by adults than at faces rated less attractive. However, the effect of aesthetic judgments on visual behavior in the first years of life is still unclear and no study has systematically examined it. Here, we tested whether the relation between adults’ explicit aesthetic preferen...

We live in a world of rich dynamic multisensory signals. Hearing individuals rapidly and effectively integrate multimodal signals to decode biologically relevant facial expressions of emotion. Yet, it remains unclear how facial expressions are decoded by deaf adults in the absence of an auditory sensory channel. We thus compared early and profoundl...

Infants respond preferentially to faces and face‐like stimuli from birth, but past research has typically presented faces in isolation or amongst an artificial array of competing objects. In the current study infants aged 3‐ to 12‐months viewed a series of complex visual scenes; half of the scenes contained a person, the other half did not. Infants...

The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we examined...

The face own-age bias effect refers to the better ability to recognize the face from one’s own age compared with other age groups. Here we examined whether an own-age advantage occurs for faces sex categorization. We examined 7- and 9-year-olds’ and adults’ ability to correctly categorize the sex of 7- and 9-year-olds and adult faces without exter...

Prior reviews of infant face processing have emphasized how infants respond to faces in general. This review highlights how infants come to respond differentially to social categories of faces based on differential experience, with a focus on race and gender. We examine six different behaviors: preference, recognition, scanning, category formation,...

Studies on facial attractiveness in human adults, infants, and newborns have consistently reported a visual preference for faces rated as attractive compared with faces rated as unattractive. Biological accounts of facial attractiveness have typically presented such preferences as arising from adaptations for mate choice or as by-products of genera...

The effective transmission and decoding of dynamic facial expressions of emotion is omnipresent and critical for adapted social interactions in everyday life. Thus, common intuition would suggest an advantage for dynamic facial expression recognition (FER) over the static snapshots routinely used in most experiments. However, although many studies...

Poster was presented the 2nd of july 2018 at the International Congress of Infant Studies in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Poster was presented the 1st of july 2018 at the International Congress of Infant Studies 2018 in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Using a composite-face paradigm, we examined the holistic processing induced by Asian faces, Caucasian faces, and monkey faces with human Asian participants in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the upper halves of two faces successively presented were the same or different. A composite-face effect was found...

Over the last 15 years, researchers have examined how infants respond to the social categories of faces. In the case of race, infants encounter more faces of their own race than faces of other races. This asymmetry in experience has been associated with five developmental changes in face processing during the first year of life. In this article, we...

Visual and auditory information jointly contribute to face categorization processes in humans, and gender is a socially relevant multisensory category specified by faces and voices that is detected early in infancy. We used an eye tracker to study how gender coherence in audio and visual modalities influence face scanning in 9- to 12-month-old infa...

The present study investigated German-learning 6-month-old infants' preference for visual speech. Visual stimuli in the infants' native language (German) were contrasted with stimuli in a foreign language with similar rhythmical characteristics (English). In a visual preference task, infants were presented with 2 side-by-side silent video clips of...

Despite some interpersonal variability, judgments of facial attractiveness are largely shared by most individuals, both within and between cultures. Infants are also sensitive to attractive faces even before being influenced by cultural standards of beauty. The intercultural agreement on this matter and its emergence during infancy suggest an evolu...

This study tracked the long-term effect of perceptual individuation training on reducing 5-year-old Chinese children's (N = 95, Mage = 5.64 years) implicit pro-Asian/anti-Black racial bias. Initial training to individuate other-race Black faces, followed by supplementary training occurring 1 week later, resulted in a long-term reduction of pro-Asia...

Human adults show an attentional bias towards fearful faces, an adaptive behaviour that relies on amygdala function. This attentional bias emerges in infancy between 5 and 7 months, but the underlying developmental mechanism is unknown. To examine possible precursors, we investigated whether 3.5-, 6- and 12-month-old infants show facilitated detect...

Previous research has suggested that early deaf signers differ in face processing. Which aspects of face processing are changed and the role that sign language may have played in that change are however unclear. Here, we compared face categorization (human/non-human) and human face recognition performance in early profoundly deaf signers, hearing s...

Children's experiences with differently aged faces changes in the course of development. During infancy, most faces encountered are adult, however as children mature, exposure to child faces becomes more extensive. Does this change in experience influence preference for differently aged faces? The preferences of children for adult vs. child, and ad...

Age is a fundamental social dimension and a youthful appearance is of importance for many individuals, perhaps because it is a relevant predictor of aspects of health, facial attractiveness and general well-being. We recently showed that facial contrast—the color and luminance difference between facial features and the surrounding skin—is age-relat...

Infants have asymmetrical exposure to different types of faces (e.g., more human than nonhuman, more female than male, and more own-race than other-race). What are the developmental consequences of such experiential asymmetry? Here, we review recent advances in research on the development of cross-race face processing. The evidence suggests that gr...

Two studies with preschool-age children examined the effectiveness of perceptual individuation training at reducing racial bias (Study 1, N = 32; Study 2, N = 56). We found that training preschool-age children to individuate other-race faces resulted in a reduction in implicit racial bias while mere exposure to other-race faces produced no such eff...

Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has down-stream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (Range = 5.9-8.5 months, N = 96) use gaze from own- versus other-race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an...

Human adults and infants show a preference for average faces, which could stem from a general processing mechanism and may be shared among primates. However, little is known about preference for facial averageness in monkeys. We used a comparative developmental approach and eye-tracking methodology to assess visual attention in human and macaque in...

Following auditory deprivation, the remaining sense of vision has shown selective enhancement in visual cognition, especially in the area of near peripheral vision. Visual acuity is poor in the far periphery and may be an area where sound confers the greatest advantage in hearing persons. Experience with a visuospatial language such as British Sign...

This review of the literature on the emergence of language describes two opposing views of phonological development, the sound-based versus the whole-word-based accounts. An integrative model is proposed which claims that learning sublexical speech sounds and producing wordlike vocalizations are in fact parallel processes that feed each other durin...

Right hemisphere lateralization for face processing is well documented in typical populations. At the behavioral level, this right hemisphere bias is often related to a left visual field (LVF) bias. A conventional mean to study this phenomenon consists of using chimeric faces that are composed of the left and right parts of two faces. In this parad...

Early multisensory perceptual experiences shape the abilities of infants to perform socially-relevant visual categorization, such as the extraction of gender, age, and emotion from faces. Here, we investigated whether multisensory perception of gender is influenced by infant-directed (IDS) or adult-directed (ADS) speech. Six-, 9-, and 12-month-old...

Data. Proportion of total looking time (PTLT) that each infant directed at the matching and non-matching faces over the four test trials. (CSV)

In the first year of life, infants typically are exposed to people predominantly from their own race and rarely encounter other-race individuals. In the last decade and a half, a number of studies have found that this differential face-race experience leads infants to display perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces. Infants...

We are living in a world of rich dynamic multisensory sensory signals. Normal-hearing individuals rapidly integrate multimodal information for effectively decoding biologically relevant social signals, in particular from faces. However, it remains unclear how the representations of facial expression of emotions develop in the absence of the auditor...

Early linguistic experience has an impact on the way we decode audiovisual speech in face-to-face communication. The present study examined whether differences in visual speech decoding could be linked to a broader difference in face processing. To identify a phoneme we have to do an analysis of the speaker's face to focus on the relevant cues for...

We examined category formation for faces differing in age in 9- and 12-month-olds, and the influence of exposure to infant faces on such ability. Infants were familiarized with adult or infant faces, and then tested with a novel exemplar from the familiarized category paired with a novel exemplar from a novel category (Experiment 1). Both age group...

The visual preferences of infants for adult versus infant faces were investigated. Caucasian 3.5-and 6-month-olds were presented with Caucasian adult vs. infant face pairs and Asian adult vs. infant face pairs, in both upright and inverted orientations. Both age groups showed a visual preference for upright adult over infant faces when the faces we...

Perceptual narrowing has been observed in human infants for monkey faces: 6-month-olds can discriminate between them, whereas older infants from 9 months of age display difficulty discriminating between them. The difficulty infants from 9 months have processing monkey faces has not been clearly identified. It could be due to the structural characte...