Infant Discrimination of Faces in Naturalistic Events Actions Are More Salient Than Faces

• Published in: Developmental psychology Vol. 44; no. 4; pp. 983 - 996
• Main Authors: Bahrick, Lorraine E, Newell, Lisa C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Psychological Association 01-07-2008
• Subjects: Activities; Age Factors; Attention; Babies; Biological and medical sciences; Child development; Cognitive development; Context Effect; Developmental psychology; Discrimination; Discrimination Learning; Emotions; Face; Face Perception; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Human Body; Humans; Infancy; Infant; Infant Development; Infants; Kinesthetic Perception; Male; Mental Recall; Motion Perception; Newborn. Infant; Orientation; Perception; Perceptions; Psychological factors; Psychology; Psychology, Child; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychomotor Performance; Salience; Selective Attention; Social values; Socialization; Visual Discrimination; Young Children; face perception; action perception; infant perception; selective attention; Human; Action; Infant; Cognition; Experimental study; Perceptual development; Selective attention; Vision; Perception; Cognitive development; Face; Visual attention; Stimulus discrimination
• ISSN: 0012-1649; 1939-0599
• DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.44.4.983

Despite the fact that faces are typically seen in the context of dynamic events, there is little research on infants' perception of moving faces.
L. E. Bahrick, L. J. Gogate, and I. Ruiz (2002)
demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminate and remember repetitive actions but not the faces of the women performing the actions. The present research tested an attentional salience explanation for these findings: that dynamic faces are discriminable to infants, but more salient actions compete for attention. Results demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminated faces in the context of actions when they had longer familiarization time (Experiment 1) and following habituation to a single person performing 3 different activities (Experiment 2). Further, 7-month-old infants who have had more experience with social events also discriminated faces in the context of actions. Overall, however, discrimination of actions was more robust and occurred earlier in processing time than discrimination of dynamic faces. These findings support an attentional salience hypothesis and indicate that faces are not special in the context of actions in early infancy.