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…

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…

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…

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…

Previous research has shown that 3-month-olds prefer own- over other-race faces. The current study used eye-tracking methodology to examine how this visual preference develops with age beyond 3 months and how infants differentially scan between own- and other-race faces when presented simultaneously. We showed own- versus other-race face pairs to…

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…

The current study aimed at investigating own- vs. other-species preferences in 3-month-old infants. The infants' eye movements were recorded during a visual preference paradigm to assess whether they show a preference for own-species faces when contrasted with other-species faces. Human and monkey faces, equated for all low-level perceptual…

The present study investigates the human-specificity of the orienting system that allows neonates to look preferentially at faces. Three experiments were carried out to determine whether the face-perception system that is present at birth is broad enough to include both human and nonhuman primate faces. The results demonstrate that the newborns…

An abundance of experience with own-race faces and limited to no experience with other-race faces has been associated with better recognition memory for own-race faces in infants, children, and adults. This study investigated the developmental origins of this other-race effect (ORE) by examining the role of a salient perceptual property of…

The present study examined whether 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants could categorize faces according to race. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with different female faces from a common ethnic background (i.e. either Caucasian or Asian) and then tested with female faces from a novel race category. Nine-month-olds were able to form…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

Adults recognize familiar faces better by their internal than external face parts. It is not clear when children achieve this internal face part advantage, however, previous research has suggested that it emerges after the age of seven years. The present study was the first study to show personally familiar adult faces (school staff) to children…