Adults and children easily distinguish between fine-grained variations in trustworthiness intensity based on facial appearance, but the developmental origins of this fundamental social skill are still debated. Using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) oddball paradigm coupled with electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, we investigated…

Previous studies have proposed that humans may be born with mechanisms that attend to conspecifics. However, as previous studies have relied on stimuli featuring human adults, it remains unclear whether infants attend only to adult humans or to the entire human species. We found that 1-month-old infants (n = 23) were able to differentiate between…

From very early in life, humans can approximate the number and surface area of objects in a scene. The ability to discriminate between 2 approximate quantities, whether number or area, critically depends on the ratio between the quantities, with the most difficult ratio that a participant can reliably discriminate known as the Weber fraction.…

Perceptual narrowing--a phenomenon in which perception is broad from birth, but narrows as a function of experience--has previously been tested with primate faces. In the first 6 months of life, infants can discriminate among individual human and monkey faces. Though the ability to discriminate monkey faces is lost after about 9 months, infants…

Observers watched videotaped face-to-face mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions of 12 infants at 2, 4, or 6 months of age. Half of the observers saw each mother paired with her own infant and another infant of the same age (mother tapes) and half saw each infant paired with his or her mother and with a stranger (infant tapes). Observers…

Presents a specific procedure for obtaining reliable pupillometric measurements from infants and young children and adults. Discussion of the data and previous studies indicate that pupillometry holds promise as an objective measure of visual sensitivity for infants and young children. (Author/SDH)

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

All of the target articles in this issue are concerned with trajectories of development, with all focusing in one way or another on U-shaped functions. For purposes of this commentary, the author is primarily concerned with the Cashon and Cohen article. The mechanisms whereby one processes faces represent one of several perceptual/cognitive…

A paradigm was designed to study how infants identify live faces. Eight- to 21-week-old infants were seated comfortably and were presented an adult female, dressed in a white laboratory coat and a white turtle neck sweater, until habituation ensued. The adult then left the room. One minute later either she or an identically garbed confederate…

Adults readily detect changes in face patterns brought about by the inversion of eyes and mouth when the faces are viewed upright but not when they are viewed upside down. Research suggests that this illusion (the Thatcher illusion) is caused by the interfering effects of face inversion on the processing of second-order relational information…