Baby Facial: Infants monkey with face recognition
By Bruce Bower
Between ages 6 months and 9 months, a baby accomplishes a heads-up feat, of sorts. That’s when he or she transforms a budding aptitude for detecting animal faces in general into a proficiency at discerning different human faces. This finding bears on the controversial issue of what types of knowledge a baby comes equipped with at birth.
Infants learn to recognize faces through a process that exchanges perceptual breadth for depth, say psychologist Olivier Pascalis of the University of Sheffield in England and his colleagues. By 9 months of age, daily exposure to people has prepped babies’ perceptual system to identify human-specific facial features so that they no longer detect subtle facial differences between members of other species, Pascalis’ group proposes in the May 17 Science.