Developmental Research Methods by Scott A. Miller

Author:Scott A. Miller [Miller, Scott A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

From “Newborns’ Preferential Tracking of Face-Like Stimuli and its Subsequent Decline,” by M. Johnson, S. Ddziurawiec, H. Ellis, and J. Morton, 1991, Cognition, 40, p. 6. Copyright 1991 by Elsevier. Reprinted with permission.

What about younger infants? Although results are neither consistent nor easy to interpret, research provides intriguing evidence that some face-processing ability may be present, at least in rudimentary form, within days or even hours of birth.

Figure 12.5 shows the stimuli used in one test of this possibility. The stimuli were presented not statically but in motion across the infant’s visual field, and the measure was of whether the infants moved their eyes or head to track the stimuli. The question was whether the facelike pattern would prove more interesting than the other targets. As the figure shows, the answer was yes: The infants, some of whom were only a few minutes old, tracked the face more than they did the other stimuli (M. H. Johnson, Ddziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991). Since the Johnson et al. study, there have been other reports of a preference for faces in newborns, including demonstrations with the Fantz preference method (and thus static rather than moving stimuli—e.g., Mondloch et al., 1999). There has also been increasing evidence that it is really faceness and not other aspects of the stimulation that determines the infant’s response.

Not only do infants distinguish between faces and nonfaces; they can also discriminate among different faces, and they find some faces more interesting than others. Intriguingly, from early in life babies show a preference for relatively attractive faces compared to other faces. Ramsey-Rennels and Langlois (2007) provide a review and possible explanation for this phenomenon. From early in life infants also show a preference for faces from their own race. Not only do they prefer own-race faces; they recognize and discriminate among own-race faces better than among faces from other races (Anzures et al., 2013). This effect takes time and experience to develop, however, for it is not evident in the first 3 months of life. Finally, and not surprisingly, infants prefer their parent’s (in most research the mother’s) face to faces in general.

Just as with the own-race effect, this last effect obviously must take time to develop—infants are not born knowing their own mother. What is remarkable, however, is how little time it takes to learn the mother’s face. A number of studies (e.g., Bushnell, 2001; Sai, 2005; Walton et al., 1992) have demonstrated a preference for the mother’s face within a few hours of birth. It is true that newborns’ recognition abilities are in various ways limited relative to those of older infants. Nevertheless, the fact that babies can learn aspects of the mother’s face from only a few hours of experience must surely count as one of the most impressive achievements of infancy.

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