Infants rapidly detect human faces in complex naturalistic visual scenes

Infants respond preferentially to faces and face‐like stimuli from birth, but past research has typically presented faces in isolation or amongst an artificial array of competing objects. In the current study infants aged 3‐ to 12‐months viewed a series of complex visual scenes; half of the scenes c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental science 2019-11, Vol.22 (6), p.e12829-n/a
Main Authors: Kelly, David J., Duarte, Sofia, Meary, David, Bindemann, Markus, Pascalis, Olivier
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Eye Movements
Face
face detection
Facial Recognition
Female
Humans
infancy
Infant
Infants
Life Sciences
Male
Neurons and Cognition
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Psychology and behavior
Visual Perception - physiology
visual search
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Summary:Infants respond preferentially to faces and face‐like stimuli from birth, but past research has typically presented faces in isolation or amongst an artificial array of competing objects. In the current study infants aged 3‐ to 12‐months viewed a series of complex visual scenes; half of the scenes contained a person, the other half did not. Infants rapidly detected and oriented to faces in scenes even when they were not visually salient. Although a clear developmental improvement was observed in face detection and interest, all infants displayed sensitivity to the presence of a person in a scene, by displaying eye movements that differed quantifiably across a range of measures when viewing scenes that either did or did not contain a person. We argue that infant's face detection capabilities are ostensibly “better” with naturalistic stimuli and artificial array presentations used in previous studies have underestimated performance. We report clear evidence for face detection and orienting in a sample of 241 infants aged 3‐ to 12‐months of age using complex naturalistic scenes. The artificial array presentations used in previous studies might have underestimated infant abilities as they lack context and are unfamiliar to infants.
ISSN:1363-755X
1467-7687
DOI:10.1111/desc.12829