Baby facial: infants monkey with face recognition. (Science News This Week).Between ages 6 months and 9 months, a baby accomplishes a heads-up feat, of sorts. That's when he or she transforms a budding aptitude for detecting animal faces in general into a proficiency at discerning different human faces. This finding bears on the controversial issue of what types of knowledge a baby comes equipped with at birth. Infants learn to recognize faces through a process that exchanges perceptual breadth for depth, say psychologist Olivier Pascalis of the University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. Reputation Sheffield was the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2001 and has consistently appeared as their top 20 institutions. in England and his colleagues. By 9 months of age, daily exposure to people has prepped babies' perceptual system to identify human-specific facial features Facial Features See also anatomy; beards; body, human; eyes. gnathism the condition of having an upper jaw that protrudes beyond the plane of the face. — gnathic, adj. so that they no longer detect subtle facial differences between members of other species, Pascalis' group proposes in the May 17 Science. "Perhaps we're looking at how innate knowledge about faces changes over time due to visual experience," Pascalis says. "But it's impossible to say for sure, since experience with faces begins as soon as a child is born." Pascalis' group had previously observed brain wave changes in 6-month-olds, indicating that the babies recognized previously seen monkey faces even when presented in new orientations. Adults exhibited no brain wave signatures of recognition on this task. The researchers then conducted face-recognition tests with 60 babies--half 6 months old and the rest 9 months old--and 11 adults. In a series of trials, each participant first viewed the face of a white man or woman and then saw the same face paired with another of the same sex and race. Further trials presented pairs of macaque macaque (məkäk`), name for Old World monkeys of the genus Macaca, related to mangabeys, mandrills, and baboons. All but one of the 19 species are found in Asia from Afghanistan to Japan, the Philippines, and Borneo. monkey faces, one of which had just been seen. Six-month-olds looked much longer at both novel human and monkey faces than at the just-seen faces, a sign the researchers took for both recognition of and preference for the novel images. Adults and 9-month-olds looked longer at new human faces, but not at new monkey faces. A similar refining of perception also occurs as infants learn native speech sounds, the researchers note. After being able to discriminate between sounds from various languages, babies by age 6 months notice novel sounds solely from their native tongue (SN: 2/8/92, p. 311). Early facial and language perception is probably governed by a common "tuning apparatus," Pascalis theorizes. These skills usually develop together; infants learn to recognize both their mother's face and her voice by around 2 months of age. The new findings on facial perception make sense, comments psychologist Paul C. Quinn of Washington and Jefferson College “Jefferson College” redirects here. For other uses, see Jefferson College (disambiguation). Jefferson College (known more informally as JeffCo) is a public, two-year community college located in Hillsboro, Missouri. in Washington, Pa. "With enough experience, some types of expertise can develop in infants," he says. However, Quinn suspects that face recognition arises from babies' innate preferences for certain perceptual features, such as curved contours, rather than from more complex innate knowledge about faces, as other scientists suspect (SN: 7/7/01, p. 10). Harvard University Harvard University, mainly at Cambridge, Mass., including Harvard College, the oldest American college. Harvard College Harvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. psychologist Jerome Kagan Jerome Kagan (born 1929) is one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology. Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at Harvard University, he has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are agrees. Although the new study highlights the role of experience in face recognition, it's difficult to pinpoint what an infant knows based solely on increased time spent looking at previously seen faces, Kagan cautions. With adults, however, face-recognition proficiency appears firmly grounded in human-specific features. Even primatologists who have long studied monkeys prove unable to discriminate between previously seen and new monkey faces, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. an unpublished study by Odile Petit PETIT, sometimes corrupted into petty. A French word signifying little, small. It is frequently used, as petit larceny, petit jury, petit treason. PETIT, TREASON, English law. The killing of a master by his servant; a husband by his wife; a superior by a secular or religious man. of the Primate Ethology ethology, study of animal behavior based on the systematic observation, recording, and analysis of how animals function, with special attention to physiological, ecological, and evolutionary aspects. and Behavioral Ecology Behavioral ecology The branch of ecology that focuses on the evolutionary causes of variation in behavior among populations and species. Thus it is concerned with the adaptiveness of behavior, the ultimate questions of why animals behave as they do, rather Center in Strasbourg, France. |
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