International Journal of Behavioral Development This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Sensitivity to spacing information increases more for the eye region than for the mouth region during childhood
In this study, we tested 6–16-year-old children’s sensitivity to vertical spacing when the eyes or the mouth is the facial feature selectively manipulated. Despite the similar discriminability of these manipulations when they are embedded in inverted faces (Experiment 1), children’s sensitivity to spacing information manipulated in upright faces improved with age only when the eye region was concerned (Experiment 2). Moreover, children’s ability to process the eye region did not correlate with their selective visual attention, marking the automation of the mechanism (Experiment 2). In line with rece...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: de Heering, A., Schiltz, C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Early and later experience with one younger sibling affects face processing abilities of 6-year-old children
Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the effects of experience on perceptual learning. To this end, we compared the effects of early (before age 3) and later (after age 5) experience with one younger sibling on 6-year-olds’ processing of adult and infant faces. Unlike children without siblings, those with a younger sibl...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Cassia, V. M., Proietti, V., Pisacane, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

The role of facial expressions in attention-orienting in adults and infants
Faces convey many signals (i.e., gaze or expressions) essential for interpersonal interaction. We have previously shown that facial expressions of emotion and gaze direction are processed and integrated in specific combinations early in life. These findings open a number of developmental questions and specifically in this paper we address whether such emotional signals may modulate the behavior in a following gaze context. A classic spatial cueing paradigm was used to assess whether different facial expressions may cause differential orienting response times and modulate the visual response to a peripheral target in adults...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Rigato, S., Menon, E., Gangi, V. D., George, N., Farroni, T. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Infant face preferences after binocular visual deprivation
Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old (n = 3) or older than 12 weeks (n = 4). Like newborns, but unlike visually normal age-matched controls, the patients looked preferentially toward config (three squares arranged as facial features) over its inverted version and none of the older patients preferred a positive-contrast fac...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Mondloch, C. J., Lewis, T. L., Levin, A. V., Maurer, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Attention-orienting and attention-holding effects of faces on 4- to 8-month-old infants
Attention-orienting and attention-holding effects of faces were investigated in a sample of 64 children, aged 4 to 8 months old. A visual preference task was used, in which pairs of faces and toys were presented in eight 10-second trials. Effects of age and sitting-ability were examined. Attention-orienting toward faces was measured using the direction of infants’ first looks toward faces. The effect of attention-holding of faces was measured by calculating infants’ face preference scores at 1-second time intervals across the duration of each trial. Faces were not found to attract infants’ first looks sig...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: DeNicola, C. A., Holt, N. A., Lambert, A. J., Cashon, C. H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Positive, but not negative, facial expressions facilitate 3-month-olds' recognition of an individual face
The current study examined whether and how the presence of a positive or a negative emotional expression may affect the face recognition process at 3 months of age. Using a familiarization procedure, Experiment 1 demonstrated that positive (i.e., happiness), but not negative (i.e., fear and anger) facial expressions facilitate infants’ ability to recognize an individual face. Experiment 2 showed that the advantage of positive over negative facial expressions is driven by the processing of salient features inherent in the happy expression, rather than by the processing of the configural information conveyed by the ent...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Brenna, V., Proietti, V., Montirosso, R., Turati, C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Cultural background modulates how we look at other persons' gaze
The current study investigated the role of cultural norms on the development of face-scanning. British and Japanese adults’ eye movements were recorded while they observed avatar faces moving their mouth, and then their eyes toward or away from the participants. British participants fixated more on the mouth, which contrasts with Japanese participants fixating mainly on the eyes. Moreover, eye fixations of British participants were less affected by the gaze shift of the avatar than Japanese participants, who shifted their fixation to the corresponding direction of the avatar’s gaze. Results are consistent with ...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Senju, A., Vernetti, A., Kikuchi, Y., Akechi, H., Hasegawa, T., Johnson, M. H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Do young infants prefer an infant-directed face or a happy face?
Infants’ visual preference for infant-directed (ID) faces over adult-directed (AD) faces was examined in two experiments that introduced controls for emotion. Infants’ eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of side-by-side dynamic faces. When emotion was held constant, 6-month-old infants showed no preference for ID faces over AD faces, but a second group of infants looked significantly longer at AD faces conveying happy emotion over sad ID faces conveying sad emotion. Together, these findings suggest that infants’ visual preference for ID faces is mediated, at least in part, by the presence ...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Kim, H. I., Johnson, S. P. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

The role of early visual attention in social development
Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e., mother) and unfamiliar (i.e., stranger) static faces at 6, 9, and 12 months of age. Infants showed a preference for scanning their mother’s face as compared to a stranger’s face, and displayed increased attention to the eye region as compared to the mouth region. Infants al...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Wagner, J. B., Luyster, R. J., Yim, J. Y., Tager-Flusberg, H., Nelson, C. A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Sex differences in facial scanning: Similarities and dissimilarities between infants and adults
When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning might account for these processing discrepancies, 3–4-month-olds, 9–10-month-olds, and adults viewed faces presented individually while an eye tracker recorded eye movements. Regardless of age, males shifted fixations between internal and external facial features more ...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Rennels, J. L., Cummings, A. J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Face-scanning behavior to silently-talking faces in 12-month-old infants: The impact of pre-exposed auditory speech
We examined German infants’ face-scanning behavior to side-by-side presentation of a bilingual speaker’s face silently speaking German utterances on one side and French on the other side, before and after auditory familiarization with one of the two languages. The results showed that 12-month-old infants showed no general visual preference for either of the visual speeches, neither before nor after auditory input. But, infants who heard native speech decreased their looking time to the mouth area and focused longer on the eyes compared to their scanning behavior without auditory language input, whereas infants ...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Kubicek, C., de Boisferon, A. H., Dupierrix, E., L{oelig}venbruck, H., Gervain, J., Schwarzer, G. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Development of face scanning for own- and other-race faces in infancy
The present study investigated whether infants visually scan own- and other-race faces differently as well as how these differences in face scanning develop with age. A multi-method approach was used to analyze the eye-tracking data of 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants scanning dynamically displayed own- and other-race faces. We found that 6-month-olds showed differential fixation, fixating significantly more on the left eye and mouth of own-race faces, but more on the nose of other-race faces. Infants at 9 months of age fixated more on the eyes of own-race faces, but more on the mouth of other-race faces. A scan path a...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Xiao, W. S., Xiao, N. G., Quinn, P. C., Anzures, G., Lee, K. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

The face perception system becomes species-specific at 3 months: An eye-tracking study
The current study aimed at investigating own- vs. other-species preferences in 3-month-old infants. The infants’ eye movements were recorded during a visual preference paradigm to assess whether they show a preference for own-species faces when contrasted with other-species faces. Human and monkey faces, equated for all low-level perceptual characteristics, were used. Our results demonstrated that 3-month-old infants preferred the human face, suggesting that the face perception system becomes species-specific after 3 months of visual experience with a specific class of faces. The eye tracking results are also showing...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Di Giorgio, E., Meary, D., Pascalis, O., Simion, F. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Recognition of amodal language identity emerges in infancy
Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic auditory-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we asked whether and when do infants become capable of recognizing amodal language identity, a critical perceptual skill that is necessary for the development of multisensory communication. Because, at a minimum, such a skill requires the ability to perceive suprasegmental auditory ...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Lewkowicz, D. J., Pons, F. Tags: Articles Source Type: research

Six-month-old infants match other-race faces with a non-native language
Early in life, infants possess an effective face-processing system which becomes specialized according to the faces present in the environment. Infants are also exposed to the voices and sounds of caregivers. Previous studies have found that face–voice associations become progressively more tuned to the types of association most prevalent in the environment. The present study investigated whether 6-month-old infants associate own-race faces with their native language and faces from a different race with a non-native language. Infants were presented with pictures of own- and other-race faces simultaneously, with a nat...
Source: International Journal of Behavioral Development - March 25, 2013 Category: Child Development Authors: Uttley, L., de Boisferon, A. H., Dupierrix, E., Lee, K., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Pascalis, O. Tags: Articles Source Type: research