Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

Infants' preference for faces was investigated in a cross-sectional sample of 75 children, aged 3 to 11 months, and 23 adults. A visual preference paradigm was used where pairs of faces and toys were presented side-by-side while eye gaze was recorded. In addition, motor activity was assessed via parent report and the relation between motor…

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…

Detecting self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions are important abilities in order to interact with others. The relationship between these domains was investigated in 6-8-month-old infants. In a contingency-preference task, infants observed their own legs on a real-time and a delayed video display. In an imitation task, the…

Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e.,…

Infants' visual preference for infant-directed (ID) faces over adult-directed (AD) faces was examined in two experiments that introduced controls for emotion. Infants' eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of side-by-side dynamic faces. When emotion was held constant, 6-month-old infants showed no preference for ID faces over AD…

A head-mounted camera was used to measure head direction. The camera was mounted to the forehead of 20 6- and 20 12-month-old infants while they watched an object held at 11 horizontal (-80° to + 80°) and 9 vertical (-48° to + 50°) positions. The results showed that the head always moved less than required to be on target. Below 30° in the…

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning…

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual…

Early in life, infants possess an effective face-processing system which becomes specialized according to the faces present in the environment. Infants are also exposed to the voices and sounds of caregivers. Previous studies have found that face-voice associations become progressively more tuned to the types of association most prevalent in the…

Previous research indicates that monolingual infants have difficulty learning minimal pairs (i.e., words differing by one phoneme) produced by a speaker uncharacteristic of their language environment and that bilinguals might share this difficulty. To clearly reveal infants' underlying phonological representations, we minimized task demands by…

The current study examined whether and how the presence of a positive or a negative emotional expression may affect the face recognition process at 3 months of age. Using a familiarization procedure, Experiment 1 demonstrated that positive (i.e., happiness), but not negative (i.e., fear and anger) facial expressions facilitate infants' ability to…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…

This longitudinal study examined the influence of stimulus material on attention and expectation learning in the visual expectation paradigm. Female faces were used as attention-attracting stimuli, and non-meaningful visual stimuli of comparable complexity (Greebles) were used as low attention-attracting stimuli. Expectation learning performance…

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…