This research investigated whether the perception of social-causal relation alone triggers both infants' evaluation processes and expectations about the social preferences of informed third parties. Three experiments were carried out, using the violation of expectation (VoE) paradigm. During the familiarization phase, infants saw events in which…

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…

Four experiments investigated newborns' ability to discriminate, recognize, and learn visual information embedded in the schematic face-like patterns preferred at birth. Results indicated that newborns discriminated face-like stimuli relying on their internal features and recognized a perceptual invariance between face-like configurations in…

Existing data indicate that newborns are able to recognize individual faces, but little is known about what perceptual cues drive this ability. The current study showed that either the inner or outer features of the face can act as sufficient cues for newborns' face recognition (Experiment 1), but the outer part of the face enjoys an advantage…