Four experiments are reported that were aimed at elucidating some of the controversial issues concerning the preference for facelike patterns in newboms. The experiments were devised to contrast the original and the revised versions of the sensory hypothesis and the structural hypothesis as accounts of face preference in newborns. Experiments 1A and IB supported the structural hypothesis by showing a visual preference for the stimulus for which components were located in the correct arrangement for a human face. Experiment 2 supported the sensory hypothesis by showing a visual preference for stimuli that were designed to have the optimal spatial frequency components for the newborn visual system. Experiment 3 showed that babies directed attention to a facelike pattern also when it was presented simultaneously with a nonfacelike stimulus with optimal spatial frequency for the newborn visual system.

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be modulated by experience. Moreover, in each of the 3 experiments, differences in the magnitude of the observed face inversion effect for each age class of faces were taken to reflect a difference in the processing strategies used to recognize the faces of each age. Evidence from Experiment 3 indicates that these strategies can be tuned by experience. The data are discussed with reference to an experience-based framework for face recognition.

Numbers are represented as ordered magnitudes along a spatially oriented number line. While culture and formal education modulate the direction of this number-space mapping, it is a matter of debate whether its emergence is entirely driven by cultural experience. By registering 8-9-month-old infants' eye movements, this study shows that numerical cues are critical in orienting infants' visual attention towards a peripheral region of space that is congruent with the number's relative position on a left-to-right oriented representational continuum. This finding provides the first direct evidence that, in humans, the association between numbers and oriented spatial codes occurs before the acquisition of symbols or exposure to formal education, suggesting that the number line is not merely a product of human invention.

While associations between number and space, in the form of a spatially oriented numerical representation, have been extensively reported in human adults, the origins of this phenomenon are still poorly understood. The commonly accepted view is that this number-space association is a product of human invention, with accounts proposing that culture, symbolic knowledge, and mathematics education are at the roots of this phenomenon. Here we show that preverbal infants aged 7 months, who lack symbolic knowledge and mathematics education, show a preference for increasing magnitude displayed in a left-to-right spatial orientation. Infants habituated to left-to-right oriented increasing or decreasing numerical sequences showed an overall higher looking time to new left-to-right oriented increasing numerical sequences at test (Experiment 1). This pattern did not hold when infants were presented with the same ordinal numerical information displayed from right to left (Experiment 2). The different pattern of results was congruent with the presence of a malleable, context-dependent baseline preference for increasing, left-to-right oriented, numerosities (Experiment 3). These findings are suggestive of an early predisposition in humans to link numerical order with a left-to-right spatial orientation, which precedes the acquisition of symbolic abilities, mathematics education, and the acquisition of reading and writing skills.

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.