Poster group
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poster
One experiment is described which shows that newborn infants spend more time looking at attractive faces when paired with faces judged to be less attractive by adults. Two further experiments demonstrate that this 'attractiveness effect' is affected by the orientation of the facial stimuli and that newborn infants use information about internal facial features in making preferences based on attractiveness. The results are discussed in terms of innate facial prototypes and rapid learning about faces in the hours after birth.
poster
Newborns orient more to a schematic drawing of a face with thefeatures naturally arranged than with the features inverted. Johnson andMorton (1991) attributed the inborn face preference to a subcorticalmechanism called CONSPEC. This mechanism contains structural informationabout faces but would not process the individual features that characterisethe internal configuration of a particular face. However, newborns can recognize the picture of the mother's face(Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Deruelle, Fabre-Grenet, 1995) and can alsorecognize a familiarized face (Pascalis and de Schonen, 1994). To explainthese results a general pattern-learning mechanism that processes only theexternal-configural properties of a stimulus ( i.e. hair line and outercontour) was hypothized. The present study was aimed at testing the presence of a generalpattern-learning mechanism, not specific for faces, and if this mechanismcan process and learn to discriminate the internal features of a schematicdrawing of a face. Two experiments were carried out using the habituationtechnique with an infant control procedure. In both experiments the stimuliwere two head-shaped, head-sized, two dimensional white forms with threeblobs. In Experiment 1 the blobs were in the appropriate locations for theeyes and the mouth (i.e. face-like patterns). In Experiment 2 the locationof the blobs was inverted (i.e. nonface-like patterns). In Experiment 1 newborns were habituated to the face-like pattern.46amiliarization with squares blobs (Experiment 1A) or diamonds blobs (Experiment 1B) was followed by a preference test in which the choice wasbetween the familiar array, and the novel array differing only in the shapeof the inner elements. A preference for the novel array would show thenewborns' ability to detect the individual elements of a visual stimulus.In Experiment 2 newborns were habituated to the non face-like patternswith the same procedure of Experiment 1. In both experiments newborns showed a preference for the novelstimulus. These results are in accord with the possibility that newbornsare able to discriminate and recognize two different stimuli, eitherface-like or non face-like, on the basis of the inner features. Thatsupports the hypothesis that the processing of the identity of individualfaces during the first month of life is performed by a general-learningmechanism. More specifically, this mechanism seems to be activated bothwith faces and with not faces, and is able to discriminate the innerfeatures when the external contour remains constant.
poster
A still unresolved issue is the earliest age infants process a face asa whole as opposed to processing it as a collection of independentfeatures. Recently, Cashon and Cohen (1999) reported using a switchdesign to investigate this issue with 7-month-old infants. Theyhabituated infants to two color photographs of adult female faces andthen tested infants with one of the familiar faces, a composite face(the inner features of one familiar face and the outer features of theother), and a novel face. When the habituation and test faces werepresented upright, infants responded to the composite face as novel. Because the composite consisted of familiar features but in a novelcombination, it was concluded that the infants processed thecombination of features, i.e., the face as a whole. On the otherhand, when the faces were presented upside down, the infants respondedto the composite as if it were familiar, indicating that they hadprocessed the features (or at least the inside vs. the outside of theface) as independent pieces. This pattern of responding to uprightversus inverted faces is also consistent with the way older childrenand adults process faces.The purpose of the present study was to investigate the same faceperception issue with younger infants. Younger and Cohen (1986) hadfound that between the ages of 4- and 7-months, infants shift fromprocessing animal drawings as parts to processing the animal as a wholeobject. Thus, we were interested in how 4-month-old infants wouldprocess pictures of faces. Given Younger and Cohen's finding that4-month-old infants process animal drawings as parts, we predicted that4-month-olds would do the same with faces and, therefore, would respondto the composite face as familiar regardless of orientation.Thirty-two infants were randomly assigned to either the upright orinverted condition. During habituation, infants saw two adult femalefaces in a semi-random order. During the test they saw one of thefamiliar faces, a composite face, and a novel face. Our results weresurprising. Not only did the 4-month-olds respond as if they processedthe upright faces as a whole, they also responded as if they processedthe inverted faces as a whole! That is, in both upright and invertedface conditions, the infants responded to the composite face as novel,
poster
Seventeen 6-month old infants were tested in a standard visual preferenceparadigm. Infants were presented with six picture pairs depictingsilhouettes of human bodies; each pair included one picture thatrepresented a normal human body shape and another picture that representeda scrambled human body shape. There were six looking trials that pairednormal human body shapes in various postures with different scrambledhuman body shapes. The scrambled body shapes were constructed by movingthe limbs around the body, for instance the arms came out of the head likeantenna for one of the scrambled body pictures, for another, the arms andlegs were switched so that legs protruded from shoulders and arms hungdown from hips. Adult observers described the scrambled body shapes as'weird' or 'monstrous.' Infants' looking times to the normal andscrambled body shapes during the six 30-second looking trials weremeasured and summed. Results revealed no difference in looking times toscrambled and normal body shapes (M looking times to scrambled and normalbody shapes: 18.87 seconds (SD11.86 seconds) and 18.10 seconds (SD13.65seconds), respectively). An analysis of individual looking trialsrevealed that preferences were split within but not between infants. Theidentical pattern of results was obtained when outliers were removed, andwhen the infants' first looks to each picture, rather than their totallooking times, were used as the dependent variable (M first look times toscrambled and normal body shapes: 5.19 seconds (SD2.16 seconds) and 5.23seconds (SD3.07 seconds) respectively). This pattern ofnon-discrimination of normal and scrambled body shapes was not affected bythe infants' gross motor status as independent sitters. The resultsindicate that at 6 months of age, infants have either not yet developed,or have lost, a visual preference for the human body shape. A follow-upstudy with 9-month-olds is currently underway.
poster
Three experiments are described which investigated the role of voice cues in early facial processing. The first experiment explored whether the Malaysian newborn babies can visually recognise their mother's face from that of a female stranger matched for facial brightness, hair colour and hair shape. Neonates aged between 2 and 4 hours showed a preference for the mother. This finding replicates and extends early results suggesting early face processing in neonates aged from the age of 2 hours (Sai, 1989). However, no reliable preference for the mother's face was demonstrated by neonates in the second experiment which included a rigourous control over auditory information. Neonates (mean age6.23 hrs) were prevented from experiencing the mother's voice from birth to the completion of the testing. the third experiment used the same procedure but substituted visual fixation for head orientation previously adopted. Again, no evidence for visual recognition was found. The findings of the present experiments are dicussed with respect to intermodal perception. Early face processing seems to be mediated by both auditory and visual cues, and information available to audition might be dominant. Whether, the neonate rapidly associates the mother's voice-face within the first interactions, or demonstrates a long-term memory effect for the mother's voice learned while the fetus was still in the womb, is still not determined.
poster
Ekman et al.'s (1987) research with adults indicates that sad and happy faces are universally recognized. Whether this innate ability exists from birth has not been established. Indeed, the issue about whether newborns perceive a face pattern as special remains controversial (e.g., Easterbrook, Kisilevsky, Muir, & Laplante, 1999). Nonetheless, Slater et al. (1998) have demonstrated that newborns respond preferentially to photographs of attractive as opposed to unattractive faces.For the present study, 16 healthy, full-term, 28-hour-olds (SE 15) served as subjects. Each was shown four different black and white oval patterns (17 cm x 19 cm): 1) Goren et al.'s (1975) smiling, schematic face; 2) the same face with the mouth inverted to form a frown; 3) Fantz' (1961) bull's eye; 4) Johnson and Morton's (1991) 6 x 6 checkerboard. Each stimulus had a metal loop on its back so that it could be slid onto the horizontal bar of an 80 cm high standing protractor. The protractor was used to ascertain that each stimulus was moved to 60 degrees of each newborn's midline. A Panasonic Palmcorder was used to record testing sessions.A computer equipped with a program designed to record in milliseconds was used to score newborn fixations from video-tape. Pressing the right mouse button started the chronometer (i.e., while baby tracked a stimulus), while releasing the button paused it.While in a quiet-alert state, newborns were brought to a testing room within a Hospital located in Ontario, Canada. During testing, each baby was held in a supine position on the lap of experimenter M.E. Their head-neck region was supported by M.E.'s hand. Experimenter L.B. selected the stimuli for presentation so that M.E. remained 'blind'. L.B. recorded test sessions with the video camera. The four stimuli were presented one at a time to each newborn. Each was placed facing the newborn on the bar of the protractor. Once the baby fixated the stimulus M.E. moved the stimulus/bar from its midline resting position until it reached 60 degrees on one side, whereupon its direction was reversed, and so on. The stimulus was moved until the newborn stopped tracking it for 3 seconds. The next stimulus was then presented in the same way. The initial direction toward which each stimulus moved was counterbalanced across subjects. Latin squares were used to ensure that all stimuli had an equal chance of preceding or following each other.On average, newborns looked at the checkerboard stimulus for 73 s (SE 13), the smile for 70 s (SE 13) , the bull's eye for 61s (SE 14) and the frown for 54 s (SE 12). A repeated measures ANOVA did not reveal a stimulus effect. However, planned orthogonal contrasts revealed that newborns pursued the smiling face longer than they pursued the frowning face, F(1,15)5.67, p<.05. Newborns in the present study looked preferentially at a schematic smiling as opposed to a frowning face. However, they looked at both the smiling face and the checkerboard for approximately the same length of time.
poster
It is a well known finding that adults make remarkablediscriminations, for example, of personal identity or sex, ofindividuals presented in moving point-light displays, but failto make such discriminations from similar static displays. It isalso known that infants discriminate between upright andinverted point-light displays of human movement. Further,infants categorize a vast array of items presented in staticdisplays, including facial representations of men and women. However, little is known about infants' ability to categorizemoving stimuli. Object motion conveys information not readilycaptured in static displays and may play a critical role inearly categorization skills. The purpose of the work reportedhere and currently underway is to explore infants' ability todistinguish between men and women presented in point-lightdisplays. Film clips were created of men and women, matched forheight and wearing the same black clothing, walking in the darkat a normal pace on a theater stage. One-inch squares ofluminescent tape were attached to each of the walker's jointsand head. All 12-second videos were captured on computer. Adultand child observers correctly identified the sex of all thewalkers in the videos at levels above chance. Twenty-four,6-month old and 24 12-month old infants sit in a highchairfacing a computer monitor. A video camera, positioned beside themonitor, focuses on the infants' faces. Using an infant controlprocedure, half of the infants in each age group are firsthabituated to 4 videos of women and tested with one novel womanand one novel man, and then, following a 3 minute break, arehabituated to 4 videos of men and tested with one novel man andone novel woman. The remaining infants receive the habituationand test sets in the reverse order. To increase infants'attention to the videos, all videos are presented with the samerepeating score of music. Two trained observers view the infantson a video monitor and record the duration of infants' fixationsto the stimuli. Preliminary data analysis in the form of a 2(age) x 2 (presentation order) x 2 (walker's sex) x 2 (trial)repeated-measures ANOVA of responses to the two test trialstimuli collected thus far indicate that infants at both agesdiscriminate women from men presented in the point-lightdisplays. Infants show greater looking following habituation tonovel category members than to familiar category members. Ifsuch results continue to be manifested, this project willdemonstrate that infants as young as six months of agecategorize objects based on motion-carried information anddistinguish between men and women based on information aboutgait. Results have implications for the types of stimulipresented to infants, models of categorization, and genderknowledge acquisition during the first year of life.
poster
Research concerning the development of attractiveness stereotypes hasdemonstrated the robust nature of the Ôbeauty is good' stereotype: attractivepeople are associated with positive traits whereas unattractive people areassociated with negative traits. Although the greater part of stereotypingresearch has focussed on adults and school-aged children, studies havedemonstrated that infants possess preferences for attractiveness that developduring the first year of life. Furthermore, investigations of attractivenesseffects on social interactions have shown that 12-month-olds can treat peopledifferentially based upon facial attractiveness. The question remains as towhen infants apply their concept of attractiveness to evaluate and treat peopledifferentially. Two studies were conducted to determine if infants possesscategorical knowledge consistent with the Ôbeauty is good' stereotype duringthe first year of life. Study 1 investigated whether or not 12-month-oldsassociate positive characteristics with attractive faces and negativecharacteristics with unattractive faces. Using an intermodal matchingprocedure, the infants were simultaneously presented with video segments ofattractive and unattractive faces paired with voices speaking in either apositive or negative tone. The results indicated that 12-month-old infantslooked longer at attractive faces when hearing a positive tone voice and lookedlonger at unattractive faces when hearing a negative tone voice. Study 2 wasidentical to the first study but investigated whether or not the associationfound in Study 1 was present in 9-month-olds. This pattern of looking at thestereotype concordant face was not found in the 9-month-old infants. Thesefindings suggest the development of associations consistent with the Ôbeauty isgood' stereotype by the end of the first year of life.
poster
The literature in both Developmental and Social Psychology isreplete with studies showing that both children and adults have preferencesfor and stereotypes about people based on facial attractiveness. Evenyoung infants prefer attractive over unattractive faces and this findingappears to be robust for faces varying in sex, age and race (Langlois etal., 1987; Langlois, Ritter, Roggman, & Vaughn, 1991). How do thesepreferences (as assessed in visual preference paradigms) of young infantsdevelop into stereotypes? Several theories of stereotyping posit thatcognitive categorization of groups is a prerequisite of stereotyping(Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1982). Infants and young children must realize thatGroup A is different from Group B before they can assign differentattributes or stereotypes to the groups. The purpose of our study was toexamine whether or not six-month-old infants are capable of categorizingfaces as either attractive or unattractive. Participants were 101 six-month-old infants recruited from birthannouncements in the local newspaper. They were familiarized to a seriesof either attractive or unattractive Caucasian female faces. Oncehabituated using an infant controlled procedure, the infants were presentedwith two faces from the original/familiar attractiveness category and twofemale faces from the other attractiveness category during the test trials.The order in which the test faces were shown was counterbalanced. The results showed that when infants were habituated tounattractive faces, they dishabituated when shown attractive faces duringthe test trials (t(47) 2.58, p .01) demonstrating that 6-month-oldsperceive attractive faces as different from unattractive faces. We arestill testing infants for the second condition of the study in whichinfants are habituated to attractive faces and tested on unattractivefaces. Thus far, based on 53 infants, we have an almost significant resultin which infants dishabituate to the unattractive faces (t(52) 1.62, p .06). These results suggest infants as young as six months of age cancategorize faces based on facial attractiveness. Such cognitivecategorization of faces into different groups may be the rudiment of latersocial stereotyping. These findings may help us to understand howpreferences for attractive faces later become linked to positive andnegative traits for attractive and unattractive people.REFERENCESLanglois, J.H., Roggman, L.A., Casey, R.J., Ritter, J.M., Rieser-Danner,L.A., & Jenkins, V.Y. (1987). Infant preferences for attractive faces:Rudiments of a stereotype? Developmental Psychology, 23, 363-369.Langlois, J.H., Ritter, J.M., Roggman, L.A., & Vaughn, L.S. (1991).Facial diversity and infant preferences for attractive faces.Developmental Psychology, 27, 79-84.Zebrowitz-McArthur, L. (1982). Judging a book by its cover: A cognitiveanalysis of the relationship between physical appearance and stereotyping.In A.H. Hastorf & A.M. Isen (Eds.), Cognitive Social Psychology (pp.149-209). New York: Elsevier.
poster
Several studies have demonstrated that children as young aspreschool age associate positive characteristics (e.g., being friendly)with attractive faces and negative characteristics (e.g., hitting) withunattractive faces (Dion, 1973; Dion & Berscheid, 1974). In addition,infants as young as 2-to-3-months-old prefer to look longer at attractivefaces (Langlois et al., 1987) and, by 12-months-old, behave preferentiallytoward attractive adults (Langlois, Roggman, & Reiser-Danner, 1990). Theliterature, however, has a gap between late infancy to age three, and it isunclear when young children begin to stereotype based on attractiveness.This study, therefore, investigated whether or not 30- and 36-monthtoddlers associate attractive and unattractive children's faces withcertain pleasant or unpleasant objects and behaviors. This study alsoassessed whether toddlers prefer the attractive faces to the unattractivefaces. In this study, 79 participants (49 thirty-month-old and 30thirty-six-month-old toddlers) were presented with a flipbook containingsix pairs of velcro-framed color photographs of children's faces (i.e.,three pairs of boys and three pairs of girls). Within each pair ofchildren's faces, an attractive child and an unattractive child werematched as closely as possible for sex, age, facial expression, and haircolor. The velcro frames allowed the child to attach pictures ofschematically drawn objects (i.e., an attractive teddy bear and anunattractive teddy bear to give to the children who 'played' with them, asandbox with a separate pail/shovel combination to give to the child withwhom they wanted to play, and an ice cream cone to give to the child whomthey liked the best) and schematically drawn faces showing both nice andmean expressions on them (to give to the children who also might be nice ormean). The pictures of objects and faces were laminated and had velcrobacking in order for children to easily attach the items to thephotographs. Children were given a score of either 1 for a stereotypicalresponse or 0 for a counter-stereotypical response on each of the sixmatching tasks. The six response scores were added for a single totalstereotyping score for each subject. An ANOVA showed that 36-month-oldtoddlers made significantly more stereotypical responses (x3.77) than30-month-old toddlers (x3.20), F (1, 77)4.966, p<.05. Further analysesare being conducted to determine any differences in children's responses oneach of the six trials and to determine the extent of stereotypingexhibited by each age group. Results suggest that there is a developmental progression from30-months-old to 36-months-old in the extent to which children associatepositive and negative traits to attractive and unattractive faces. Oldertoddlers, like preschoolers, seem to be more likely than younger toddlersto see attractive children's faces as pleasant in characteristics andperhaps even potential playmates. However, even 30-month-old toddlers showsome evidence of stereotyping based on attractiveness, although thisevidence may depend on certain factors such as experience with children'sfaces. Further studies could assess how and why a simple visual preferencefor attractive faces in infancy is transformed into stereotypes by age30-36-months.
poster
This study investigated the role of person familiarity in the ability of16-week-old infants to recognize emotional expressions. Infants (N3D72) werepresented simultaneously with two filmed facial expressions, happy and sad,accompanied by a single vocal expression that was concordant with one ofthe two facial expressions. Three groups were tested (n3D24): (a) Unfamiliar- emotions were displayed by an unfamiliar female, (b) Familiar - emotionswere displayed by each infant's own mother, (c) Familiar Non-Synch:emotions were displayed by mothers, but synchrony between mothers' lipmovements and vocalizations was disrupted by inserting a 5-s lag. For halfof the infants in each group happy was the sound-matched emotion and forhalf sad was. We examined whether infants exhibit different patterns ofaffective responses across emotional displays of their own mothers versusunfamiliar women and respond differently to happy and sad emotional displays. Infants' positive and negative affect was scored frame-by-frame with amodified version of the scales developed by Thompson and Lamb (1984) andthe AFFEX System (Izard, Dougherty, & Hembree, 1983). Positive affect codesincluded faint, full, and bright smiles, and was generally defined asupward movements of the corners of the mouth together with raised cheeks,smooth forehead, and neutral brows. Negative affect codes includedfrowning, low-level distress or cry-faces, and was defined generally asdownward movements of the corners of the mouth, raising of the innercorners of the brows, and narrowing of the eyes. Next, 3 additional naEFveobservers rated infants' overall interactiveness and overall emotionalstate in real-time. Both frame-by-frame and global affective measures showed that when happywas the sound-specified emotion infants who watched their own mothersexhibited more positive affect and more engagement than when maternal sadfacial expressions were sound-specified. In contrast, infants who watchedthe unfamiliar female exhibited the same level of positive affectiveresponsiveness across the two conditions. In addition, infants exhibitedmore intense smiles when they observed their own mothers, especially whentheir mothers' happy facial expressions were sound-specified. They alsotended to express their first smile sooner and their first distress boutlater when maternal happy expressions were sound-specified versus when sadwas the sound-specified emotion. In addition, infants' looking preferences indicated that when theemotional expressions were portrayed by each infant's own mother, infantslooked significantly longer to the facial expressions that were accompaniedby an affectively matching vocal expressions. Infants presented with theemotional expressions of an unfamiliar woman did not. Even when synchronyrelations were disrupted, infants presented with emotional expressions oftheir own mothers looked longer to the facial expression that wassound-specified, indicating that some factor other than temporal synchronyguided their looking preferences. Together results from this study show that when more contextualinformation - that is, person familiarity - was available, infants as youngas 16-weeks recognized happy and sad expressions of their own mothers.These findings suggest that early on in development infants are sensitiveto contextual information that potentially facilitates some of the meaningof others' emotional expressions.
poster
This research explores the roles of familiarity and familyinteractions in infants' sensitivity to others' expressions. Emotionalexpressiveness is an important means of communication, and recognizingothers' expressions is essential to emotional signaling. Research on thedevelopment of affect recognition indicates that it begins in infancy andprovides the foundation for other developing competencies, including theability to predict and respond appropriately in social situations. Ourunderstanding of infants' sensitivity to affect, however, has been drawnprimarily from studies using strangers as models for stimuluspresentations. Yet attention to the use of familiar or unfamiliardepictions is especially important when attempting to understand whetherinfants derive meaning from others' expressions. Given that socialinteractions occur primarily between infants and their caregivers,investigation of infants' sensitivity to their own mothers' and fathers'expressions may be the ideal means for investigating this competency. Ofthe studies focused specifically on infants' perception of affect, veryfew have used mothers in the presentations of such expressions, and nonehave used fathers. In attempting to identify some organizing and contextual factorsrelatedto infants' developing ability to perceive others' affectivecommunications, a number of questions were considered. Specifically, are4-month-old infants sensitive to emotional signals when presented byfamiliar individuals? Are expressions perceived equally well whenportrayed by fathers and mothers? Are some affective signals moremeaningful than others? Does increased parental involvement facilitategreater recognition? To begin to address these questions, we explored infants' recognition oftheir own mothers' and fathers' dynamic expressions of emotion.Information on families with 3.5- to 4-month-old infants was gathered inthe home and the lab. Parental facial/vocal expressions of happiness,sadness, and anger were videotaped in the home for later presentation tothe infants in an intermodal preference task. Semi-structured parentalinterviews also were completed in the home to assess variations inmother-infant and father-infant involvement patterns. In the lab, infantsalternately viewed their mothers and fathers and male and female strangersportraying targeted pairs of expressions. Each expression pair waspresented simultaneously on two monitors and accompanied by a single vocalsoundtrack affectively matched to one of the facial expressions. Theamount of looking to each expression was recorded, and variations inreported parental involvement patterns were correlated with their infant'sattention patterns. Preliminary analyses (more than half the subjects have completed theirsessions) suggest that using parents to portray the expressionsfacilitates infants' ability to detect the intermodal correspondencesbetween the acoustic and visual presentations of the affectiveexpressions. Infants looked longer (in sec) at the in-sound facialexpressions for mother, father and female stranger only. The degree towhich variations in sensitivity to maternal and paternal affect might beinterpreted in light of similarities and differences in reportedmother-infant and father-infant interactive patterns also is discussed.