Face Perception Essay

1255 Words6 Pages
Face Recognition in Infants: The newborn infants enter the world visually naïve but are possessed with a number of tools and means with which to make sense of the world around them. Developmental psychologists are more concerned about the early stages at which a child begins to differentiate between faces and innate objects. Moreover, faces provide infants with information about the identity, gender, age, and emotional expression of their caregivers who they are likely to spend more time with. Likewise, being able to recognize their caregivers is also crucial for the development of attachment styles they form at an early age which eventually leaves a long-lasting effect on their future relationships. Several experiments have reported that newborn infants, just a few hours from birth, are able to discriminate between individual faces, and will evidently show preference for the mother’s face when she is shown paired with a female stranger’s face. Furthermore, many researchers also focus on the question on when the infant is first able to recognize the mother’s face. In addition to this, it is also important to point out how infants are able to recognize familiar faces. Studies and researches on infant perception gives an insight on when and how a human brain is able to recognize faces and objects along with the neural processes involved in this task. From birth, infants appear to find faces very interesting to look at, and from a very young age, they display impressive competency at detecting information in the face such as identity, emotional expression and direction of eye gaze. They are, for instance, attentive to faces, can imitate both emotional and facial gestures. This ability is facilitated by a neural system that begins to influence infants’ behaviour in the first months of life. Given this information, it can be suggested that the
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