Newborns' recognition of changing and unchanging aspects of schematic faces.
The present study investigated newborns' ability to discriminate, recognize, and learn visual information embedded in the schematic face-like patterns preferred at birth. Four experiments were carried out using the visual-paired comparison paradigm. Results indicated that newborns discriminated face-like stimuli relying on their internal features (Experiments 1 and 4) and recognized a perceptual invariance between face-like configurations in conditions of low (Experiment 2) and high-perceptual variability (Experiment 3) of their inner elements. Altogether, data show that the presence of the preferred structure that schematically defines a face, displaying a triplet of elements in the correct locations for eyes and mouth, does not constitute a limit that constrains newborns' face learning processes.
Turati
Chiara
C
Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy.
Simion
Francesca
F
D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*