About Face- Psychology

1320 Words6 Pages
About Face In the article, “About Face” written by Eric Jaffe, he explains how people and infants are able to recognize faces. With the information known about prosopagnosia, a disorder that renders a person unable to identify a face, and fusiform gyrus, an area specialized for visual face processing; researchers are able to identify how people and infants are able to recognize different faces. Throughout this article the author gives satisfying examples to reclaim his belief on what is thought to be true. The author explains his results from his case studies showing that infants react differently to different faces depending on their age. For example, from the moment infants are born, they begin gathering information on face. Studies showed that within just a few exposures, newborns become so familiar with their mother’s face that they prefer it to a stranger’s. In this article, the author describes the opinions of several researchers including Russell Bauer, Paul Quinn and Jim Tanaka. Quinn came to know that in the last five to ten years infants responded to the social attributes of faces. Paul also reported that infants just a few months old prefer silhouettes of human heads to those of animals (59). Russell Bauer showed the motorcycle victim faces of relatives or celebrities and found that the victim performed at chance. Tanaka says there was a plausible explanation with the expertise theory of face perception. He also stated that autistic patients have trouble with face processing because of social attention deficits (61). Eric Jaffe’s strong points outweighed the negative ones in this particular case. The features of this article that I discovered were the strongest included, how an infant is able to recognize its mother’s face within just a few looks. Studies done by researchers show that three month old girl babies went more towards women when raised
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