Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: actions are more salient than faces

Abstract

Despite the fact that faces are typically seen in the context of dynamic events, there is little research on infants' perception of moving faces. L. E. Bahrick, L. J. Gogate, and I. Ruiz (2002) demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminate and remember repetitive actions but not the faces of the women performing the actions. The present research tested an attentional salience explanation for these findings: that dynamic faces are discriminable to infants, but more salient actions compete for attention. Results demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminated faces in the context of actions when they had longer familiarization time (Experiment 1) and following habituation to a single person performing 3 different activities (Experiment 2). Further, 7-month-old infants who have had more experience with social events also discriminated faces in the context of actions. Overall, however, discrimination of actions was more robust and occurred earlier in processing time than discrimination of dynamic faces. These findings support an attentional salience hypothesis and indicate that faces are not special in the context of actions in early infancy.

Figure 1

Still images of activities. Women 1, 2, and 3 were used in Experiments 1 and 3; Women 1, 2, 3, and 4 were used in Experiment 2. All four individuals whose faces appear here were aware that their likenesses would be published. Photographs of Women 1, 2, and 3 are from “Attention and memory for faces and actions in infancy: The salience of actions over faces in dynamic events,” by L. E. Bahrick, L. J. Gogate, and I. Ruiz, 2002, Child Development, 73, Figure 1, p. 1631. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 2

Experiment 1: Proportions of total looking time (PTLT) and standard deviations (in parentheses) to novel actions and faces. Exp. = experiment.

Figure 3

Experiment 2: Mean visual recovery and standard deviation (in parentheses) to a change in face and action versus a change in action alone. Visual recovery is calculated as the difference between the average of the two posthabituation trials and the average of the two face/action test trials and the two action-alone test trials.

Figure 4

Experiment 3: Proportions of total looking time (PTLT) and standard deviations (in parentheses) to novel actions and faces. Exp. = experiment.