Infants' early experience with faces shapes how they perceive and process faces. On average, infants show greater expertise (e.g., better facial recognition) when processing familiar face types (e.g., females and same-race faces) compared to less familiar face types (e.g., males and other-race faces). Given that such expertise impacts every face-to-face social interaction throughout development, it is critical to understand why some infants show this expertise, whereas others do not. Moreover, it is important to determine if the neutral expressions of the faces typically used to test this expertise produce results different from those found with smiling faces, an expression most infants more commonly experience and prefer. Such expertise is evident via how infants scan faces, what faces they prefer to look at, and how well they recognize faces, but no one has assessed if and how these abilities are related. This expertise becomes particularly evident between 6 and 9 months of age, but it is unclear why or how it emerges. There is also a need to better understand how this early expertise manifests later in development. To address these issues, this research will examine how 6-10-month-olds' recent facial experience, emotional state, temperament, and motor skills affect their scanning, visual preferences for, and recognition of female/male faces or familiar/unfamiliar race faces with smiling or neutral expressions. It will also assess the relationships between perception (scanning) and processing (preferences/recognition) abilities. The investigator will also examine how this expertise emerges, and presumably stabilizes, in a small sample of infants that will participate every two weeks between 6 to 10 months of age. Participants will be retested at 3.5 years of age to examine how infant face processing abilities and individual characteristics predict preschoolers' face processing.
The significance of this research is that it should provide a more comprehensive understanding of why and how face processing expertise develops. It should also demonstrate how individual differences in face processing expertise and other characteristics (e.g., temperament) contribute to the development of concepts about familiar and unfamiliar social groups. For example, infants' emotional responses to a certain sex or race may represent the first concepts associated with that social group. Such concepts can be positive or negative and have noteworthy consequences for how perceivers judge and treat a target person and how that target behaves, impacting the target's relationships, health, and academic and occupational success. Gaining knowledge of individual differences in the origins of how individuals perceive, process, and acquire concepts about members of various social groups is critical to understanding the social factors that affect people's well being.
