Making eye contact is the most powerful mode of establishing a communicative link between humans. During their first year of life, infants learn rapidly that the looking behaviors of others conveys significant information. Two experiments were carried out to demonstrate special sensitivity to direct eye contact from birth. The first experiment tested the ability of 2-to 5-day-old newborns to discriminate between direct and averted gaze. In the second experiment, we measured 4-month-old infants' brain electric activity to assess neural processing of faces when accompanied by direct (as opposed to averted) eye gaze. The results show that, from birth, human infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in mutual gaze and that, from an early age, healthy babies show enhanced neural processing of direct gaze. The exceptionally early sensitivity to mutual gaze demonstrated in these studies is arguably the major foundation for the later development of social skills.T he perception of faces, and the understanding that faces can reflect internal states of social partners, are vital skills for the typical development of humans. Of particular importance is processing information about eyes and eye-gaze direction. Although the perception of averted gaze can elicit an automatic shift of attention in the same direction (1), allowing the establishment of ''joint attention'' (2), mutual gaze (eye contact) provides the main mode of establishing a communicative context between humans (3-5). A number of lines of evidence suggest that specific neural mechanisms are engaged when human adults (6) or other primates (7) detect the direction of gaze in another's face. In addition, it is known that, from at least 4 months of age, human infants will shift their spatial attention toward the direction of a gaze shift when viewing a face (8, 9), and it is commonly agreed that such skills are vital for subsequent social development (10). However, considerable controversy remains with regard to whether the perception of eye gaze is a perceptual skill acquired through experience (11), or caused by innate mechanisms. This controversy is also relevant to the proposal that deficits in eye-gaze perception may be symptomatic of, or even contribute to, autism (12). Individuals with autism have difficulties with many forms of social communication, and their gaze processing is impaired at various levels, such as eye contact, gaze following, joint attention, and understanding gaze within a mentalistic framework (13)(14)(15).It has been shown that human newborns have a visual preference for face-like stimuli (16), prefer faces with eyes opened (17), and tend to imitate certain facial gestures (18). Preferential attention to perceived faces with direct gaze would provide the most compelling evidence to date that human newborns are born prepared to detect socially relevant information. This was investigated in experiment 1. In experiment 2, we attempt to gain converging evidence for the differential processing of direct gaze in infants by recording even...

An inborn predisposition to attend to biological motion has long been theorized, but had so far been demonstrated only in one animal species (the domestic chicken). In particular, no preference for biological motion was reported for human infants of <3 months of age. We tested 2-day-old babies' discrimination after familiarization and their spontaneous preferences for biological vs. nonbiological point-light animations. Newborns were shown to be able to discriminate between two different patterns of motion (Exp. 1) and, when first exposed to them, selectively preferred to look at the biological motion display (Exp. 2). This preference was also orientation-dependent: newborns looked longer at upright displays than upside-down displays (Exp. 3). These data support the hypothesis that detection of biological motion is an intrinsic capacity of the visual system, which is presumably part of an evolutionarily ancient and nonspecies-specific system predisposing animals to preferentially attend to other animals.

The present study was aimed at investigating whether, because of a differential sensitivity between the upper and the lower visual fields, in a visual preference task newborns would orient more frequently and look longer at patterns with a great number of high-contrast areas in the upper or lower visual field. Newborns were presented with three pairs of geometrical stimuli, each composed of a pattern with a greater number of elements in the upper part or a pattern with more elements in the lower part. The results showed a reliable preference for the stimuli that had more elements in the upper than in the lower part. The evidence obtained suggests the possibility that, at birth, the visibility of a stimulus depends not only on its sensory properties, but also on its structural characteristics.

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 over the inner part (Experiment 2). Inversion of the face stimuli disrupted recognition when only the inner portion of the face was shown, but not when the whole face was fully visible or only the outer features were presented (Experiment 3). The results enhance our picture of what information newborns actually process and encode when they discriminate, learn, and recognize faces.