Categorical perception, demonstrated as reduced discrimination of within-category relative to between-category differences in stimuli, has been found in a variety of perceptual domains in adults. To examine the development of categorical perception in the domain of facial expression processing, we used behavioral and event-related potential (ERP)…

Infants' responses to male and female faces and their preferences for happy versus fearful faces were studied to extend findings indicating that infants at 7 months can generalize discrimination between expressions of happiness and surprise across four different female models' faces. In the first experiment, a paired-comparison procedure was used…

Used event-related potentials to determine whether infants show differences in spatial and temporal characteristics of brain activation during face and object recognition. Found that infants' experience with specific examples within categories and their general category knowledge influenced the neural correlates of visual processing. (Author/KB)