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...

There is currently no agreement as to how specific or general are the mechanisms underlying newborns' face preferences. We address this issue by manipulating the contrast polarity of schematic and naturalistic face-related images and assessing the preferences of newborns. We find that for both schematic and naturalistic face images, the contrast polarity is important. Newborns did not show a preference for an upright face-related image unless it was composed of darker areas around the eyes and mouth. This result is consistent with either sensitivity to the shadowed areas of a face with overhead (natural) illumination and͞or to the detection of eye contact.eye contact ͉ face processing

Several research groups have identified a network of regions of the adult cortex that are activated during social perception and cognition tasks. In this paper we focus on the development of components of this social brain network during early childhood and test aspects of a particular viewpoint on human functional brain development: “interactive specialization.” Specifically, we apply new data analysis techniques to a previously published data set of event-related potential ~ERP! studies involving 3-, 4-, and 12-month-old infants viewing faces of different orientation and direction of eye gaze. Using source separation and localization methods, several likely generators of scalp recorded ERP are identified, and we describe how they are modulated by stimulus characteristics. We then review the results of a series of experiments concerned with perceiving and acting on eye gaze, before reporting on a new experiment involving young children with autism. Finally, we discuss predictions based on the atypical emergence of the social brain network

The ability of newborns to discriminate and respond to different emotional facial expressions remains controversial. We conducted three experiments in which we tested newborns’ preferences, and their ability to discriminate between neutral, fearful, and happy facial expressions, using visual preference and habituation procedures. In the first two experiments, no evidence was found that newborns discriminate, or show a preference between, a fearful and a neutral face. In the third experiment, newborns looked significantly longer at a happy facial expression than a fearful one. We raise the possibility that this preference reflects experience acquired over the first few days of life. These results show that at least some expressions are discriminated and preferred in newborns only a few days old.