Social cognition in infants: Attention to the human face

Abstract

This study investigated infant attention to the human face. A set of stimuli consisting of Mother, a Stranger, a manneQuin, a schematic Face, and a Geometric stimulus was presented to one-, three-, and five-month-old infants in paired comparison trials in order to examine the influence of familiarity, animation, complexity, and facial configuration on infants' attention. There were several exemplars of each stimulus so that the results generalize beyond specific stimuli. Across several analyses of looking behavior, infants ranked the stimuli, S-M-Q-F-G, indicating that a particular combination of characteristics makes the human face interesting to infants. Infants' ordering of the stimuli was dependent on two factors relating to animation and complexity. Infants at all ages preferred the complex animated faces. The preference for complex and unfamiliar faces increased with age. Relative to other characteristics, facial configuration was not of special importance to infants' attention.