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Face Perception Development During Early Childhood
Abstract
This article addresses the development of face processing during the first 4 years of life. Beginning with newborns' preference for faces we describe how and when infants begin to categorize and recognize different aspects of faces like gender, attractiveness, and familiarity. We also examine the extent to which young children rely on featural and configural information when they process faces. Further on we focus on the processing of social information in faces like emotional expressions and gaze direction. We finally provide evidence that experience plays a crucial role in the development of face expertise in infants and young children.
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Evidence from fields as diverse as cognitive, evolutionary, and developmental psychology, as well as cognitive neuroscience, has increasingly pointed to the ‘special’ nature of face recognition. A critical examination of the literature supports the view that faces begin to be seen as a separate class of objects within the first 6 months of life. Not surprisingly, the neural systems that underlie face recognition also come on line during this period of time. Less clear, however, are the mechanisms whereby these events occur. It seems likely that face recognition reflects an experience-expectant process, whereby exposure to faces during a sensitive period of development likely leads to perceptual and cortical specialization. However, it is unknown what the role of experience is in maintaining this ability, and how long this sensitive period lasts. After reviewing three related models that attempt to account for the way the ability to recognize faces develops, a number of suggestions are offered for testing the hypothesis that face recognition depends on experience for acquisition, and for evaluating the role of experience in maintaining this ability. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We describe a set of face processing tests suitable for use with children aged from 4 to 10 years, which include tests of expression, lipreading and gaze processing as well as identification. The tests can be administered on paper or using a computer, and comparisons between the performance on computer- and paper-based versions suggest that format of administration makes little difference. We present results obtained from small samples of children at four different age groups (Study 1, computer-based tests), and larger samples at three age groups (Study 2, paper-based tests) from preschool to 10 years of age. The tests were found to be developmentally sensitive. There were quite strong correlations between performance on different tests of the same face processing ability (e.g. gaze processing), and generally rather weaker correlations between tests of different abilities.
Holistic face processing was investigated in newborns, 3-month-old infants, and adults through a modified version of the composite face paradigm and the recording of eye movements. After familiarization to the top portion of a face, participants (N = 70) were shown 2 aligned or misaligned faces, 1 of which comprised the familiar top part. In the aligned condition, no visual preference was found at any group age. In the misaligned condition, 3-month-olds preferred the face stimulus with the familiar top part, adults preferred the face stimulus with the novel one, and newborns did not manifest any visual preference. Results revealed that both infants' and adults' eye movements may be affected by holistic face information and demonstrated holistic face processing in 3-month-olds.
Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Deruelle, and Fabre-Grenet (1995) showed that while 4-day-old infants looked longer at their mother's face than at a stranger's, they did not do so if both women were wearing headscarves. In the present experiment, we obtained similar results for infants of 19–25 days. In contrast, a group of 35- to 40- day-old infants was able to make the discrimination with mother and stranger wearing headscarves. When both women wore masks, so that only hair and chin lines were visible, the discrimination was not made earlier than 120 days. There was also a developmental trend from interest in the mother for 19- to 25-day-old infants, to interest in the stranger for the 145- to 155-day-old infants. Further investigation showed that the main contribution toward this trend was from the male infants.
Four experiments are described which investigated the role of the mother's voice in facilitating recognition of the mother's face at birth. Experiment 1 replicated our previous findings (Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 1989; 7: 3-15; The origins of human face perception by very young infants. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Glasgow, Scot- land, UK, 1990) indicating a preference for the mother's face when a control for the mother's voice and odours was used only during the testing. A second experiment adopted the same procedures, but controlled for the mother's voice from birth through testing. The neonates were at no time exposed to their mother's voice. Under these conditions, no preference was found. Further, neonates showed only few head turns towards both the mother and the stranger during the testing. Experiment 3 looked at the number of head turns under conditions where the newborn infants were exposed to both the mother's voice and face from birth to 5 to 15min prior to testing. Again, a strong preference for the mother's face was demonstrated. Such preference, however, vanished in Experiment 4, when neonates had no previous exposure to the mother's voice-face combination. The conclusion drawn is that a prior experience with both the mother's voice and face is necessary for the development of face recognition, and that intermodal perception is evident at birth. The neonates' ability to recognize the face of the mother is most likely to be rooted in prenatal learning of the mother's voice. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Infants follow the gaze of an individual with whom they are directly interacting by the end of the first year. By 18 months infants are capable of learning novel words in observational (or third-party) contexts (Floor & Akhtar, 200610.
Floor , P. and Akhtar , N. 2006 . Can 18-month-old infants learn words by listening in on conversations? . Infancy , 9 : 327 – 339 . [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®]View all references). To examine third-party gaze following in 12- and 18-month-olds, the parent and experimenter engaged in a conversation while the infant was present. For 8 trials approximately every 30 sec the experimenter would turn her head to the right or left to fixate on a toy placed on either side of the room with the parent following suit. In the first experiment, the parent was seated next to the infant and the experimenter opposite, whereas in the second experiment the positions of the adults were switched. In Experiment 1, 18-month-olds but not 12-month-olds followed gaze. In Experiment 2, 12-month-olds acquired a tendency to follow gaze during the experimental session. These results suggest that an incipient ability to follow third-party gaze is present by 12 months and that infants acquire a more reliable and general ability to follow the gaze of noninteractive others between 12 and 18 months.
Three experiments are described which investigated the ability of neonates to discriminate between the face of their mother and that of a strange adult female and to show face recognition. The first experiment indicated a reliable preference for the mother's face even where a control for olfactory information was used. No evidence for any effect of sex or breast vs. bottle feeding was found. A second experiment used the same procedure but substituted a visual mask for the olfactory one previously adopted. Under these conditions no evidence of preference was found. Finally, a third experiment considered the possibility that mothers were actively recruiting their own infant's attention and found that adult observers were unable reliably to distinguish mothers from strangers on the basis of any differential behaviour by mother and stranger. The conclusion is drawn that neonates can recognize their mother on the basis of visual clues alone and that these cues relate to memory for featural attributes of the mother's face rather than to attention-recruiting behaviour on her part.
The present study utilized a short-term longitudinal research design to examine the hypothesis that shyness in preschoolers is differentially related to different aspects of emotion processing. Using teacher reports of shyness and performance measures of emotion processing, including (1) facial emotion recognition, (2) non-facial emotion recognition, and (3) emotional perspective-taking, we examined 337 Head Start attendees twice at a 24-week interval. Results revealed significant concurrent and longitudinal relationships between shyness and facial emotion recognition, and either minimal or non-existent relationships between shyness and the other aspects of emotion processing. Correlational analyses of concurrent assessments revealed that shyness predicted poorer facial emotion recognition scores for negative emotions (sad, angry, and afraid), but not a positive emotion (happy). Analyses of change over time, on the other hand, revealed that shyness predicted change in facial emotion recognition scores for all four measured emotions. Facial emotion recognition scores did not predict changes in shyness. Results are discussed with respect to expanding the scope of research on shyness and emotion processing to include time-dependent studies that allow for the specification of developmental processes. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Babies followed manual pointing by an adult to locate the more peripheral of a pair of identical targets, whereas a change of head and gaze direction allowed accurate target identification only for the first target to enter the infant's field of view. Babies accurately followed manual pointing into the periphery of their right visual field some 3 months before they did so to their left. To investigate whether following pointing involves precise linear vector extrapolation, different combinations of head, eye and pointing cues were studied with 4.5-year-old children and adults. Neither head movements, nor head and eye movements, nor eye movements alone were accurate cues for children, whereas pointing allowed accurate spatial localization to peripheral positions. Adults accurately followed pointing to the outer periphery, but not to inner positions. These studies suggest that comprehension of pointing is unlikely to depend on extrapolating precise linear vectors along the pointing arm because a precise vector system should yield accurate localization irrespective of the position of the referent. Instead, eyes, head, nose and manual pointing cues may differentially refer to broad zones of visual space. They serve as differential cues because each varies in the extent of lateral movement. Thus, babies and children may follow pointing more accurately than head and eye movements simply because this is the most effective cue for redirecting attention to the outer periphery of each visual hemifield.
Many studies have demonstrated that newborns prefer upright faces over upside-down faces. Based on this evidence, some have suggested that faces represent a special class of stimuli for newborns and there is a qualitative difference between the processes involved in perception of facelike and non-facelike patterns (i.e. structural hypothesis). Others suggest that there is no reason to suppose that faces are different from other patterns, because faces, like any other class of visual stimuli, are subject to filtering by the properties of the visual system (i.e. sensory hypothesis). The core question that will be addressed in the present paper is whether, to manifest itself, face preference requires the unique structure of the face, represented by the relative spatial location of its internal features, or rather some more general properties that other stimuli may also possess. Evidence will be presented supporting the idea that newborns do not respond to facelike stimuli by ‘facedness’ but, rather, by some general structural characteristics that best satisfy the constraints of the immature visual system. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This study tested the presence of the face inversion effect in 4-month-old infants us-ing habituation to criterion followed by a novelty preference paradigm. Results of Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings, showing that when 1 single photograph of a face is presented in the habituation phase and when infants are required to recog-nize the same photograph, no differences in recognition performance with upright and inverted faces are found. However, Experiment 2 showed that, when infants are habituated to a face shown in a variety of poses and are required to recognize a new pose of the same face, infants' recognition performances were higher for upright than for inverted faces. Overall, results indicate that, under some experimental conditions, 4-month-olds process faces differently according to whether faces are presented up-right or inverted.
Eighty-three 12-month-old infants faced a noisy, active, object for one minute, after which the object turned 45 degrees to the left or the right. Five conditions explored what object features elicited gaze-following behavior in the infants. In one condition, the object was an adult stranger. The other four conditions used a soft, brown, dog-sized, amorphously-shaped, asymmetrical novel object that varied along two dimensions theorized as central to the identification of intentional beings: facial features and contingently interactive behavior. Infants shifted their own attentional direction to match the orientation of the actor or object in every condition except the one in which the object lacked both a face and contingently interactive behavior. Infants’‘gaze’-following behavior in general, therefore, appears to have been driven selectively by a particular configuration of behavioral and morphological characteristics, specifically those theorized as underlying attributions of intentionality rather than attributions of person per se.
Perceiving emotions correctly is foundational to the development of interpersonal skills. Five-month-old infants’ abilities to recognize, discriminate and categorize facial expressions of smiling were tested in three coordinated experiments. Infants were habituated to four degrees of smiling modeled by the same or different people; following habituation, infants were presented with a new degree of smile worn by the same and by a new person (Experiment 1), a new degree of smile and a fearful expression worn by the same person (Experiment 2) or a new degree of smile and a fearful expression worn by new people (Experiment 3). Infants showed significant novelty preferences for the new person smiling and for the fearful expressions over the new degree of smiling. These findings indicate that infants at 5 months can categorize the facial expression of smiling in static faces, and yet recognize the same person despite changes in facial expression; this is the youngest age at which these abilities have been demonstrated. The findings are discussed in light of the significance of emotion expression face processing in social interaction and infants’ categorization of faces.
This research investigated the role of person familiarity in the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to recognize emotional expressions. Infants (N= 72) were presented simultaneously with two filmed facial expressions, happy and sad, accompanied by a single vocal expression that was concordant with one of the two facial expressions. Infants' looking preferences and facial expressions were coded. Results indicated that when the emotional expressions were portrayed by each infant's own mother, infants looked significantly longer toward the facial expressions that were accompanied by affectively matching vocal expressions. Infants who were presented with emotional expressions of an unfamiliar woman did not. Even when a brief delay was inserted between the presentation of facial and vocal expressions, infants who were presented with emotional expressions of their own mothers looked longer at the facial expression that was sound specified, indicating that some factor other than temporal synchrony guided their looking preferences. When infants viewed the films of their own mothers, they were more interactive and expressed more positive and less negative affect. Moreover, infants produced a greater number of full and bright smiles when the sound-specified emotion was “happy,” and particularly when they viewed the happy expressions of their own mothers. The average duration of negative affect was significantly longer for infants who observed the unfamiliar woman than for those who observed their own mothers. These results show that when more contextual information—that is, person familiarity —was available, infants as young as 3.5 months of age recognized happy and sad expressions. These findings suggest that in the early stages of development, infants are sensitive to contextual information that potentially facilitates some of the meaning of others' emotional expressions.
The present experiment tested whether 7-month-old infants process a face as a configuration or as a collection of independent features. Thirty-two 7-month-old infants participated. Infants were habituated to two female faces and then tested on a familiar face, a switched face (consisting of all familiar features but a new combination of those features), and a novel face. It was reasoned that if infants processed only independent features of the face, the switched face should not look novel to them relative to the familiar face. If, however, infants processed the relationship among features (i.e. a configuration), the switched face should look novel. Furthermore, the study was based upon the well-established finding that inversion disrupts configural processing of faces. Thus, one group of infants saw only upright faces throughout the experiment, whereas a second group saw only inverted faces. It was hypothesized that by the age of 7 months, infants should process an upright face as a configuration, but an inverted face as independent features. The findings confirmed this hypothesis. In the upright condition, infants looked longer at the composite (switched) face than at the familiar face, whereas in the inverted condition infants did not. These findings are consistent with other reports of 7-month-old infants' ability to process configurations of both faces and non-faces and are consistent with the information processing approach proposed by Cohen (1998. An information-processing approach to infant perception and cognition. In The Development of Sensory, Motor, and Cognitive Capacities in Early Infancy, Simion F, Butterworth G (eds). Psychology Press: East Sussex; 277–300). Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We evaluated the importance of early visual input for the later development of expertise in face processing by studying 17 patients, aged 10 to 38 years, treated for bilateral congenital cataracts that deprived them of patterned visual input for the first 7 weeks or more after birth. We administered five computerized tasks that required matching faces on the basis of identity (with changed facial expression or head orientation), facial expression, gaze direction and lip reading. Compared to an age–matched control group, patients’ recognition of facial identity was impaired significantly when there was a change in head orientation (e.g. from frontal to tilted up), and tended to be impaired when there was a change in facial expression (e.g. from happy to surprised). Patients performed normally when matching facial expression and direction of gaze (e.g. looking left or right), and in reading lips (e.g. pronouncing ‘u’ or ‘a’). The results indicate that visual input during early infancy is necessary for the normal development of some aspects of face processing, and are consistent with theories postulating the importance of early visual experience (de Schonen & Mathivet, 1989; Johnson & Morton, 1991) and separate neural mediation of different components of face processing (Bruce & Young, 1986).
The performance of children at ages 4, 6, and 8 years was compared on the four types of task most often used in facial expression studies with children. We examined whether the order of mastery of emotions at different ages was constant across tasks, or alternatively, if it was task-specific. The relative difficulty of the tasks was also investigated, with the aim of arranging them into a hierarchy of increasing difficulty. The four tasks used were situation discrimination, matching discrimination, forced choice labeling, and free labeling. Accuracy was found to increase with age, but the interaction between age, type of task, and emotion was not significant. These results suggest that conclusions about the ordering of specific emotions from least to most difficult at different ages is not task dependent. Nevertheless, a significant interaction found between task and emotion suggests that such conclusions should specify which type of task generated the pattern. A hierarchy of difficulty for the tasks was only partially supported. Performance on the first three tasks was very similar but performance on free labeling was significantly poorer.
We examined 6-month-old infants' abilities to discriminate smiling and frowning from neutral stimuli. In addition, we assessed the relationship between infants' preferences for varying intensities of smiling and frowning facial expressions and their mothers' history of depressive symptoms. Forty-six infants were presented pairs of facial expressions, and their preferential looking time was recorded. They also participated in a 3-min interaction with their mothers for which duration of both mother and infant gazing and smiling were coded. Analyses revealed that the infants reliably discriminated between varying intensities of smiling and frowning facial expressions and a paired neutral expression. In addition, infants' preferences for smiling and frowning expressions were related to self-reports of maternal depressive symptoms experienced since the birth of the infant. Potential implications for social cognitive development are discussed.
The present experiments examined the degree to which analytic and holistic modes of processing play a role in the way 2–5-year-old children process facial and non-facial visual stimuli. Children between 2 and 5 years of age were instructed to categorize faces (in Experiment 1) and non-facial visual stimuli, such as birds and planes (in Experiment 2), into two categories. The categories were so constructed as to allow the children to categorize the facial and non-facial stimuli either analytically (by focusing on a single attribute) or holistically (in terms of overall similarity). The results demonstrated that the previous conclusions concerning older children's (from 6 years onwards) holistic mode of facial processing could not be generalized to younger children because most of the 2–5-year olds processed the faces by taking single facial attributes into account. A similar pattern of results emerged for the processing of objects, showing that the majority of the children focused on single attributes. Thus, for both visual domains, holistic processing was the exception rather than the rule. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The present study was aimed at exploring newborns' ability to recognize configural changes within real face images by testing newborns' sensitivity to the Thatcher illusion. Using the habituation procedure, newborns' ability to discriminate between an unaltered face image and the same face with the eyes and the mouth 180 degrees rotated (i.e. thatcherized) was investigated. Newborns were able to discriminate an unaltered from the thatcherized version of the same face when stimuli were presented in the canonical upright orientation (Experiment 1), but failed to discriminate the same stimuli when they were presented upside-down (Experiment 2). The results indicate that sensitivity to fine spatial information (defined as second-order relational information) in processing upright faces is already present at birth.
The current study compared the development of holistic processing for faces and non-face visual objects by testing for the composite effect for faces and frontal images of cars in 3- to 5-year-old children and adults in a series of four experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task. Results showed that a composite effect for faces was present as early as 3 1/2 years, and none of the age groups tested showed signs of a composite effect for cars. These findings provide the first demonstration that holistic processing is already selective for faces in early childhood, and confirm existing evidence that sensitivity to holistic information in faces does not increase from 4 years to adulthood.
In adults, three phenomena are taken to demonstrate an experience effect on face recognition: an inversion effect, a non-native face effect (so-called 'other-race' effect) and their interaction. It is crucial for our understanding of the developmental perception mechanisms of object processing to discover when these effects are present in childhood. Three- to 5-year-old Caucasian children (N = 64) were asked to recognize upright and inverted Caucasian and Asian faces. Recognition was tested with a forced-choice procedure. Overall performance improved with age. However, there was an interaction between the inversion and non-native effects that did not change with age between ages 3 and 5: (a) the inversion effect with native (Caucasian) faces was larger than with non-native (Asian) faces, and (b) upright native faces were recognized better than upright non-native faces. These results show that face orientation and morphology constrain face processing in 3- to 5-year-olds. The first 3 years of life during which the brain and the environment interact are sufficient to build a face-processing system that constrains recognition.
Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind a barrier which blocked the child's line of sight. Using two different control conditions and several different barrier types, 12- and 18-month-old infants locomoted a short distance in order to gain the proper viewing angle to follow an experimenter's gaze to locations behind barriers. These results demonstrate that, contra Butterworth, even 12-month-old infants can follow gaze to locations outside of their current field of view. They also add to growing evidence that 12-month-olds have some understanding of the looking behaviors of others as an act of seeing.
Adults readily detect changes in face patterns brought about by the inversion of eyes and mouth when the faces are viewed upright but not when they are viewed upside down. Research suggests that this illusion (the Thatcher illusion) is caused by the interfering effects of face inversion on the processing of second-order relational information (fine spatial information such as the distance between the eyes). In the current study, 6-month-olds discriminated 'thatcherized' faces when they were viewed upright but not when they were viewed upside down. These results are consistent with the notion that 6-month-olds are sensitive to second-order relational information while processing faces.
Adults use both first-order, or categorical, relations among features (e.g., the nose is above the mouth), and second-order, or fine spatial relations (e.g., the space between eyes), to process faces. Adults' expertise in face processing is thought to be based on the use of second-order relations. In the current study, 5-month-olds detected second-order changes, but 3-month-olds failed to detect second-order changes induced by 2 different manipulations. Three-month-olds did detect first-order changes, however. Also, inversion affected 5-month-olds' processing of second-order but not first-order information. These results suggest that, although sensitivity to first-order relations is available by 3 months or earlier, sensitivity to second-order information may not develop until sometime between 3 and 5 months of age.
Several researchers have proposed that developmental improvements in children's face recognition abilities might reflect an increasing reliance on configural information (i.e. spatial relations between features) in faces (Carey & Diamond, 1994; Mondloch, Le Grand & Maurer, 2002). We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' use of configural information for upright and inverted faces using Tanaka and Sengco's (1997) configural change paradigm. Participants saw a photograph of a child's face (e.g. Luke). Memory for features (e.g. Luke's mouth) was then tested in a face with the same configuration as the study face (e.g. Luke's face), in a face with a novel spatial configuration (e.g. Luke's face with the eyes shifted further apart), and presented on their own (e.g. Luke's mouth alone). We found that preschoolers and adults recognized target features from upright faces better when tested in the context of a face with the same configuration as the study face, than when they were embedded in a face with a new spatial configuration or when they were presented in isolation. This effect was lost when faces were inverted. The results suggest that adult-like styles of face processing are present from 4 years of age.
Two experiments examined whether 4-, 6-, and 10-month-old infants process natural looking faces by feature, i.e. processing internal facial features independently of the facial context or holistically by processing the features in conjunction with the facial context. Infants were habituated to two faces and looking time was measured. After habituation they were tested with a habituation face, a switch-face, or a novel face. In the switch-faces, the eyes and mouth of the habituation faces were switched. The results showed that the 4-month-olds processed eyes and mouth by feature, whereas the 10-month-olds processed both features holistically. The 6-month-olds were in a transitional stage where they processed the mouth holistically but the eyes still as a feature. Thus, the results demonstrated a shift from featural to holistic processing in the age range of 4 to 10 months.