Face perception in human infants

Early learning

• Newborns quickly learn about, and show a preference for, their mother's face (e.g., Pascalis et al., 1995).
• Infants attend both to internal and external features in learning about faces. In Walton and Bower's (1993) experiment, newborn infants who were shown four faces for a total looking time of less than 1 min extracted a facial prototype (averaged version) of the four in that they subsequently looked more at a composite of the previously seen faces than at a composite of four faces that had not been seen earlier. According to Slater and Kirby (1998), "it would be difficult for the newborns to make these discriminations without attending to the internal features. " (p. 91).
• In Walton et al.'s study, newborn infants (1 day olds) recognised a face to which they had previously been trained or familiarised across three facial transformations: (a) a photonegative transformation, (b) a size change, and (c) rotation in the third dimension. Newborns were successful with all these transformations in that they sucked more to see the transformed familiar face.

Innate factors

• "Attractiveness effect": Infants (even newborns, Slater et al., 1998) have a preference for attractive faces.