I spy with my little eye: Typical, daily exposure to faces documented from a first‐person infant perspective

Abstract

Exposure to faces is known to shape and change the face processing system; however, no study has yet documented infants' natural daily first‐hand exposure to faces. One‐ and three‐month‐old infants' visual experience was recorded through head‐mounted cameras. The video recordings were coded for faces to determine: (1) How often are infants exposed to faces? (2) To what type of faces are they exposed? and (3) Do frequently encountered face types reflect infants' typical pattern of perceptual narrowing? As hypothesized, infants spent a large proportion of their time (25%) exposed to faces; these faces were primarily female (70%), own‐race (96%), and adult‐age (81%). Infants were exposed to more individual exemplars of female, own‐race, and adult‐age faces than to male, other‐race, and child‐ or older‐adult‐age faces. Each exposure to own‐race faces was longer than to other‐race faces. There were no differences in exposure duration related to the gender or age of the face. Previous research has found that the face types frequently experienced by our participants are preferred over and more successfully recognized than other face types. The patterns of face exposure revealed in the current study coincide with the known trajectory of perceptual narrowing seen later in infancy.© 2013 The Authors. Developmental Psychobiology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 56: 249–261, 2014.

How Motor and Visual Experiences Shape Infants' Visual Processing of Objects and Faces

“…Facial input received during the first 3 months is sufficient to drive a visual preference for own-race faces in infants (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006;Kelly et al, 2007). Such preference coincides with 1-to 3-month-olds' natural daily exposure to faces documented from their own first-person perspective (Sugden, Mohamed-Ali, & Moulson, 2014). Infants at that age are exposed predominantly to own-race faces, particularly to female and adult faces of their own race.…”

Size determines whether specialized expert processes are engaged for recognition of faces

“…Sugden, Mohamed-Ali, and Moulson (2014) examined daily exposure to faces of 1-and 3-month old infants through head-mounted cameras. Although face size is not among the variables reported in this article (Sugden et al, 2014), it was nevertheless coded. The authors found that faces smaller than 58 comprised only 12% of total duration of face exposure-88% percent of duration occurred with larger faces (personal communication).…”

Early Social Experience Affects Neural Activity to Affiliative Facial Gestures in Newborn Nonhuman Primates

“…Alternatively, socio-ecologically-relevant stimuli are typically the most common environmental stimuli [28]; therefore, an action-perception mechanism may develop through experiential canalization, a developmental process that ensures the reliable emergence of important features of the organism, across diverse environments [29]. That is, the early postnatal period may be a sensitive period during which the social environment alters the neural organization of action observation and production.…”