The Faces in Infant-Perspective Scenes Change over the First Year of Life

Mature face perception has its origins in the face experiences of infants. However, little is known about the basic statistics of faces in early visual environments. We used head cameras to capture and analyze over 72,000 infant-perspective scenes from 22 infants aged 1-11 months as they engaged in daily activities. The frequency of faces in these scenes declined markedly with age: for the youngest infants, faces were present 15 minutes in every waking hour but only 5 minutes for the oldest infants. In general, the available faces were well characterized by three properties: (1) they belonged to relatively few individuals; (2) they were close and visually large; and (3) they presented views showing both eyes. These three properties most strongly characterized the face corpora of our youngest infants and constitute environmental constraints on the early development of the visual system.

[1]  Chen Yu,et al.  Contributions of Head-Mounted Cameras to Studying the Visual Environments of Infants and Young Children , 2015, Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society.

[2]  B. Balas,et al.  N170 face specificity and face memory depend on hometown size , 2015, Neuropsychologia.

[3]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Redundant constraints on human face perception? , 2014, Developmental science.

[4]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Developmental process emerges from extended brain–body–behavior networks , 2014, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[5]  Linda B Smith,et al.  Young Children's Self-Generated Object Views and Object Recognition , 2014, Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society.

[6]  Chen Yu,et al.  A bottom-up view of toddler word learning , 2013, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

[7]  Margaret C. Moulson,et al.  I spy with my little eye: Typical, daily exposure to faces documented from a first‐person infant perspective , 2013, Developmental psychobiology.

[8]  Aude Billard,et al.  Using a head-mounted camera to infer attention direction , 2013 .

[9]  Chen Yu,et al.  Embodied attention and word learning by toddlers , 2012, Cognition.

[10]  Ken Nakayama,et al.  Capturing specific abilities as a window into human individuality: The example of face recognition , 2012, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[11]  Daniel D. Dilks,et al.  A critical review of the development of face recognition: Experience is less important than previously believed , 2012, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[12]  Bruno Rossion,et al.  Developmental changes in face recognition during childhood : evidence from upright and inverted faces , 2012 .

[13]  Kasey C. Soska,et al.  Head-mounted eye tracking: a new method to describe infant looking. , 2011, Child development.

[14]  Mark H. Johnson.  Face perception: a developmental perspective , 2011 .

[15]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Perceptual Training Prevents the Emergence of the Other Race Effect during Infancy , 2011, PloS one.

[16]  Richard N. Aslin,et al.  Correspondences between what infants see and know about causal and self-propelled motion , 2011, Cognition.

[17]  O. Pascalis,et al.  The Shaping of the Face Space in Early Infancy: Becoming a Native Face Processor. , 2010, Child development perspectives.

[18]  Ipek Oruç,et al.  Critical frequencies in the perception of letters, faces, and novel shapes: evidence for limited scale invariance for faces. , 2010, Journal of vision.

[19]  L. Scott,et al.  Experience-dependent neural specialization during infancy , 2010, Neuropsychologia.

[20]  N. Fox,et al.  The effects of early experience on face recognition: an event-related potential study of institutionalized children in Romania. , 2009, Child development.

[21]  Richard N Aslin,et al.  How Infants View Natural Scenes Gathered From a Head-Mounted Camera , 2009, Optometry and vision science : official publication of the American Academy of Optometry.

[22]  O. Pascalis,et al.  The Origins of Face Processing in Humans: Phylogeny and Ontogeny , 2009, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[23]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development , 2009, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[24]  S. Bentin,et al.  Own- and other-race categorization of faces by race, gender, and age , 2008, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[25]  Kathrin Cohen Kadosh,et al.  Developing a cortex specialized for face perception , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[26]  D. Maurer,et al.  The composite face effect in six-year-old children: Evidence of adult-like holistic face processing , 2007 .

[27]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  Can generic expertise explain special processing for faces? , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[28]  Taryn W. Morrissey,et al.  Family Child Care in the United States , 2007 .

[29]  D. Maurer,et al.  Sleeper effects. , 2007, Developmental science.

[30]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces , 2006, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[31]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  The Neural Basis of the Behavioral Face-Inversion Effect , 2005, Current Biology.

[32]  A. Young,et al.  Understanding the recognition of facial identity and facial expression , 2005, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[33]  S. Lawrence,et al.  Infant and Toddler Child Care Arrangements , 2005 .

[34]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  Beyond U-Shaped Development in Infants' Processing of Faces: An Information-Processing Account , 2004 .

[35]  C. Nelson.  Can We Develop a Neurobiological Model of Human Social—Emotional Development? , 2003, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[36]  Olivier Pascalis,et al.  Specialization of Neural Mechanisms Underlying Face Recognition in Human Infants , 2002, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[37]  D. Maurer,et al.  Visual acuity: the role of visual input in inducing postnatal change , 2001, Clinical Neuroscience Research.

[38]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  Do 7-month-old infants process independent features or facial configurations? , 2001 .

[39]  M. Tarr,et al.  FFA: a flexible fusiform area for subordinate-level visual processing automatized by expertise , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[40]  J. Haxby,et al.  The distributed human neural system for face perception , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[41]  M. Bornstein,et al.  Contemporary research on parenting. The case for nature and nurture. , 2000, The American psychologist.

[42]  M. Bornstein,et al.  Contemporary research on parenting , 2000 .

[43]  James W. Tanaka,et al.  Expertise in object and face recognition , 1997 .

[44]  Michael D. Snyder,et al.  HUMAN FACTORS DESIGN GUIDE (HFDG) FOR ACQUISITION OF COMMERCIAL OFF-THE-SHELF SUBSYSTEMS, NON-DEVELOPMENTAL ITEMS, AND DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS , 1996 .

[45]  S. Hofferth.  Child care in the United States today. , 1996, The Future of children.

[46]  Marc H. Bornstein,et al.  Form and Function: Implications for Studies of Culture and Human Development , 1995 .

[47]  S. Carey,et al.  Are faces perceived as configurations more by adults than by children , 1994 .

[48]  M. Farah,et al.  Parts and Wholes in Face Recognition , 1993, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[49]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Newborns' preferential tracking of face-like stimuli and its subsequent decline , 1991, Cognition.

[50]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  CONSPEC and CONLERN: a two-process theory of infant face recognition. , 1991, Psychological review.

[51]  G. Gottlieb.  Experiential Canalization of Behavioral Development: Theory. , 1991 .

[52]  D. Geddis,et al.  Sleep patterns of New Zealand infants during the first 12 months of life , 1990, Journal of paediatrics and child health.

[53]  Anne B. Fulton,et al.  Visual fields of young children , 1988, Behavioural Brain Research.

[54]  Velma Dobson,et al.  Visual acuity in human infants assessed with stationary stripes and phase-alternated checkerboards , 1978, Vision Research.

[55]  B. McKenzie,et al.  Central and Peripheral Object Distances as Determinants of the Effective Visual Field in Early Infancy , 1978, Perception.

[56]  C. C. Goren,et al.  Visual following and pattern discrimination of face-like stimuli by newborn infants. , 1975, Pediatrics.