Caregiving experience and its relation to perceptual narrowing of face gender.

Abstract

This research examined whether infants tested longitudinally at 10, 14, and 16 months of age (N = 58) showed evidence of perceptual narrowing based on face gender (better discrimination of female than male faces) and whether changes in caregiving experience longitudinally predicted changes in infants' discrimination of male faces. To test face discrimination, infants participated in familiarization/novelty preference tasks and visual search tasks including female and male faces. At each age of participation, they were coded as having a female primary caregiver only or distributed caregiving experience (alternating experience with a female and male primary caregiver). Perceptual narrowing was evident for infants with a female primary caregiver, but only within the visual search task, which required location of a familiarized face among 3 novel distractor faces (exemplar-based discrimination); it was not evident within the familiarity/novelty preference task, which required discrimination between a familiarized and novel face (individual-based discrimination). Caregiving experience significantly explained individual changes in infants' ability to locate male faces during the visual search task after 10 months. These data are the first to demonstrate flexibility of the face processing system in relation to gender discrimination when there is a change in caregiver within the infants' natural environment after perceptual narrowing normally manifests. (PsycINFO Database Record

Attention during Visual Preference Tasks: Relation to Caregiving and Face Recognition

“…Caregiver experience also influenced whether and how infants’ performance across face processing tasks corresponded. These findings align with other work showing experience influences face processing plasticity beyond 10 months (Rennels et al., ) and add further clarity regarding how experience relates to specific components of face processing.…”

“…The latter explanation seems plausible because infants with distributed caregiving similarly attended toward internal facial features of female and male faces. Switching from a female to male caregiver might facilitate this transfer of scanning strategies and enable infants with distributed caregiving to extend their processing expertise from female to male faces (Rennels et al., ). For infants with female primary caregivers, however, their attention toward females’ and males’ internal facial features was uncorrelated, which likely reflects specialized scanning strategies for female faces only (Quinn et al., ; Rennels et al., ).…”

“…Reward stimuli used when infants located faces included 16 digitized, color videos of the familiarized adults stating, “Good job, you found me!” (in Swedish) and animated videos of colorful creatures or objects. Training stimuli consisted of color videos and images of Muppets (see Rennels et al., ).…”

“…In another study, Rennels et al. () longitudinally examined how caregiver experience affected Swedish infants’ female and male face recognition in two different tasks at 10, 14, and 16 months of age. When familiarized to one face and tested with a familiar‐novel face pairing, infants recognized both female and male faces (individual‐based discrimination), regardless of caregiver experience.…”

Sex and rank affect how infant rhesus macaques look at faces

“…For example, infants with female primary caregivers prefer female faces over male faces, whereas infants with male primary caregivers prefer male faces over female faces (Slater & Quinn, ). In addition, infants with a female primary caregiver only (as opposed to both male and female caregivers) show greater expertise in discriminating female faces (Rennels et al, ), suggesting that visual social attention is affected by the infant's experience and environment.…”