Three-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces.

Horizontal information is crucial to face processing in adults (Goffaux & Dakin, 2010). Yet the ontogeny of this preferential type of processing remains unknown. To clarify this issue, we tested 2 groups of 16 3-month-old infants in a preferential looking paradigm with upright (Group 1) or inverted (Group 2) stimuli. Each infant was exposed to 4 x 2 (left/right position of the face counterbalanced) 15-second trial consisting in the simultaneous side-by-side presentation of a full-front female face and of a full-front car, either unfiltered (UNF) or filtered in order to selectively reveal horizontal (H), vertical (V), or both orientation bands (HV) (Figure 1). As previously suggested, 3-month-old infants looked longer at upright and richer stimuli (UNF and HV) than to inverted and poorer stimuli (H and V). At upright orientation, there was also a significant interaction between the stimulus category (face/car) and the filter type (UNF, H, V, HV) revealing that, at this early age, infants looked longer at the face than at the car stimulus when horizontal information was preserved and when it was combined to vertical information (H and HV). At inverted orientation, the same interaction did not reach significance. These results suggest that horizontal information drives face processing during infancy, as it does at adulthood, and emphasize the predominant role of this band of information in the refinement of the face processing system with age. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.