title: Perceptual specialization and configural face processing in infancy.
abstract: Adults' face processing expertise includes sensitivity to second-order configural information (spatial relations among features such as distance between eyes). Prior research indicates that infants process this information in female faces. In the current experiments, 9-month-olds discriminated spacing changes in upright human male and monkey faces but not in inverted faces. However, they failed to process matching changes in upright house stimuli. A similar pattern of performance was exhibited by 5-month-olds. Thus, 5- and 9-month-olds exhibited specialization by processing configural information in upright primate faces but not in houses or inverted faces. This finding suggests that, even early in life, infants treat faces in a special manner by responding to changes in configural information more readily in faces than in non-face stimuli. However, previously reported differences in infants' processing of human versus monkey faces at 9 months of age (but not at younger ages), which have been associated with perceptual narrowing, were not evident in the current study. Thus, perceptual narrowing is not absolute in the sense of loss of the ability to process information from other species' faces at older ages.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA.
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zieber
authors.forename: Ashley
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kangas
authors.forename: Alyson
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hock
authors.forename: Angela
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hayden
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Collins
authors.forename: Henrietta
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Bada
authors.forename: Jane E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Joseph
authors.forename: Ramesh S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Bhatt
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000818:Animals; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011323:Primates; D002666:Psychology, Child; D012737:Sex Factors
keywords: Configural processing; Face perception; Face specialization; Infancy; Perceptual narrowing; Second-order spatial relations