Stefanie Peykarjou

Universität Heidelberg · Institute of Psychology

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, an...

Combining frequency tagging with electroencephalography (EEG) provides excellent opportunities for developmental research and is increasingly employed as a powerful tool in cognitive neuroscience within the last decade. In particular, the visual oddball paradigm has been employed to elucidate face and object categorization and intermodal influences...

Human adults are better at recognizing different views of a given face as belonging to the same person when that person is familiar rather than unfamiliar. To clarify the developmental origin of this well-established phenomenon, one group of five-month-olds (N = 22) was presented with pictures of four different unfamiliar female faces at a fixed ra...

The current study investigates categorical priming across modalities in 7-month-old infants using electroencephalographic (EEG) measures. In two experiments, infants were presented with sounds as primes, followed by images of human figures and furniture items as targets. In experiment 1 (N = 20), images were preceded by infant-directed (ID) or adul...

This thesis evaluates whether young infants can (1) individuate and (2) categorize faces and (3) which process(es) will be elicited under which circumstances. Using the EEG technique, I tested categorization and individuation of human faces in 9-month-old infants. In a rapid repetition event-related potential (rrERP) study, 80 different faces were...

This study investigates categorization of human and ape faces in 9-month-olds using a Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS) paradigm while measuring EEG. Categorization responses are elicited only if infants discriminate between different categories and generalize across exemplars within each category. In study 1, human or ape faces were presente...

Behavioural and recent neural evidence indicates that young infants discriminate broad stimulus categories. However, little is known about the categorical perception of humans represented as full bodies with heads and their discrimination from inanimate objects. This study compares infants' brain processing of human and furniture pictures, probing...

Categorizing objects in the visual environment is an effective strategy to enhance processing efficiency. The development of this ability has rarely been investigated using similar methods across age. We addressed this issue by means of fast periodic oddball visual stimulation, an approach that provides an implicit, objective, and robust measure of...

To investigate whether infants show neural signatures of recognizing unfamiliar human faces, we tested 9-month-olds (N = 31) in a rapid repetition ERP paradigm. Pictures of unfamiliar male and female faces (targets) were preceded either by a central attractor (Unprimed) or by a face (Primed). In the latter case, the prime faces were either identica...

Repetition of individual male faces reduced amplitude in a late time-range. Primed faces were processed more easily than unprimed faces. For primed faces, an N170-N290 complex was observed which was more pronounced for female faces.

The current study investigates how infants categorize human compared to ape faces. Nine-month-old infants were presented with priming stimuli related to human (N = 24) or ape (N = 25) face targets on different levels of categorization. Event-related potentials were recorded during a passive-looking rapid repetition paradigm. In a within-subjects de...

The current study examines the processing of upright and inverted faces in 3-year-old children (n = 35). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a passive looking paradigm including adult and newborn face stimuli. We observed three face-sensitive components, the P1, the N170 and the P400. Inverted faces elicited shorter P1 latency and...

We examined the processing of upright and inverted faces and cars in 3-month-old infants applying an event-related-potentials paradigm. The current study is the first to contrast human faces with an object category, cars, in a within-subjects design with infants. N290 amplitude was larger for inverted than upright faces, whereas no inversion effect...

In the present article we review behavioral and neurophysiological studies on face processing in adults and in early development. From the existing empirical and theoretical literature we derive three aspects that distinguish face processing from the processing of other visual object categories. Each of these aspects is discussed from a development...