Running head: INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF FACE-LIKE OBJECTS

Faces are an important source of social information for humans. Even developing infants are drawn to faces and face-like objects. The current experiment explores the ability of 4to 9month-olds to recognize face-like features in images of non-face objects. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we presented infants with upright and inverted images of face-like objects. We hypothesized that if infants were able to recognize the face-like pattern of the elements in the object imaged, they would look longer at the upright image than the inverted image. Results did not provide evidence that infants preferred the upright image, suggesting that they may not recognize the objects as face-like. INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF FACE-LIKE OBJECTS 3 Do You See What I See? Infants’ Perception of Face-like Objects We see faces everyday—not just in the people we meet, but also in the objects around us. Faces are very salient visual stimuli for humans. Most individuals can recall an instance when they looked at the markings on an object and thought it resembled a face— two dots of mustard and a ketchup smile on a burger, long eyes and a tiny gaping mouth in an electrical outlet, or a grilled cheese sandwich resembling the Virgin Mary which fetched $28,000 on E-bay (Wilson, 2005). Humans are drawn to the face-like qualities we see in objects in the world. The focus of this research was to explore whether infants also pay particular attention to face-like qualities in non-face objects in their environment. The information an infant can glean from a human face, including identity, affect, and social cues, provides good reason for infants to pay special attention to faces. Some psychologists have suggested that humans may have a special mechanism that attracts us to faces and face-like stimuli right from birth (Bowlby, 1958). This mechanism would serve an obvious adaptive purpose in attracting infants to their caregivers. Considering that infants encounter novel objects and situations so often in development, the ability to use familiar faces as a source of information about these novel events is a highly adaptive ability (Lundqvist & Ohman, 2005). Only a few hours after birth, infants prefer to look at faces, particularly familiar ones, over other patterns. Research has shown that after a few hours of exposure to their mothers’ faces, newborns prefer looking at their mother’s face over a stranger’s (Field, Cohen, Garcia, & Greenberg, 1984). Other researchers have instead suggested that infants are not attracted to faces intrinsically, but encounter faces so commonly in their environments that they are naturally attracted to them from a very early age (Kagan, 1967). Regardless of whether newborns are INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF FACE-LIKE OBJECTS 4 attracted to faces because of an innate mechanism or because of very early experience, infants as young as newborns exhibit facial preferences. Infants also exhibit a preference for face-like stimuli. In an early study, researchers tracked the degree to which newborns visually followed moving representations of a schematic face, a scrambled face, and a blank face stimulus. Newborns visually followed both the schematic and scrambled faces longer than the blank face. Moreover, they tracked the schematic face further than the scrambled face. This suggests that newborns paid more attention to the face schema structure rather than just the high contrast of the facial features presented (Goren, et al., 1975; Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991; Maurer & Young, 1983). With regard to using face-like stimuli, further research suggests that newborns’ preference for face-like schema may be even more basic than a particular set and configuration of features. More specifically, research has suggested that infants’ preference for faces may actually be attributable to a more general perceptual bias for top-heavy stimuli (Cassia et al., 2004; Simion, Cassia, Turati, & Valenza, 2003; Simion, Valenza, Macchi Cassia, Turati, & Umilta, 2002; Mondloch et al., 1999). In a study conducted by Valenza, Simion, Cassia, and Umilta (1996), the researchers presented newborns with pictures of head-like shapes containing three black squares in a top-heavy pattern (two squares on top, one on the bottom), or the same pattern with the squares inverted. The newborns reliably preferred the upright top-heavy pattern over the inverted bottom-heavy pattern. In later research, Simion and colleagues (2002) further investigated infants’ preference for top-heavy patterns using stimuli containing five black squares in a pattern that was either topor bottom-heavy depending on its orientation. Each pattern was presented upright and inverted side by side. The researchers used a visual preference task to measure whether newborns looked INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF FACE-LIKE OBJECTS 5 longer at geometric patterns that were top-heavy or bottom-heavy. Again, the infants exhibited a preference for top-heavy stimuli containing more contrasting elements in the upper half. These results further support an infant preference for upright configurations that are top-heavy like faces. Much of the literature discussed here has been conducted with simple stimuli consisting of black and white geometric designs. The goal of the present study was to investigate how infants respond to more complex face-like configurations appearing in a variety of artifacts. The images were found in a children’s book called Find a Face by Robert Francois and Jean Roberts which depicted various objects containing elements arranged in face-like patterns (see Figure 1). As one customer commented on Amazon.com, “I gave this to a nephew less than a year old. Though he is not reading yet, I know this will be a favorite. All children are fascinated with faces on themselves, others, toys, etc.” While many adults have this reaction to the pictures in this book, it is not clear whether infants would perceive the face-like nature of such images. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that if infants are able perceive the images as face-like, they would look longer at an upright version of the image over an inverted version of the same image. When upright, the image represents a face, but when inverted the face-like configuration is distorted. Studies have found that the inversion effect—the impaired recognition of inverted faces, is present in infants as young as 4-months of age (Rose, Jankowski, & Feldman, 2008; Turati, Sangrigoli, Ruel, & de Schonen, 2004). Rose et al. (2008), found that the inversion effect was present in infants at 5-months old. Infants at this age were habituated to an upright face and then tested for recognition of the same face versus a novel one in a new upright pose and an inverted pose. The infants recognized the familiar face in the first condition but not INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF FACE-LIKE OBJECTS 6 in the second, suggesting that the inversion hindered their ability to recognize that the inverted and upright faces were the same. Similarly, Turati and colleagues (2004) investigated the effects of face inversion in infants at 4 months by habituating them to a face in an upright or inverted pose and then presenting them with the image in the same or opposite orientation during the test phase. In this scenario, infants were only able to recognize the faces when the images were upright during both the habituation and test phase. Results of these studies suggest that infants of this young age process upright and inverted faces differently. Only when faces are upright are infants storing the information to aid in later recognition, suggesting that infants place greater importance on understanding faces when they faces are upright. In the present research, we investigated infants’ responses to images of objects that adults perceive as face-like when upright in Robert Francois and Jean Roberts’s children’s book Find a Face. The images depicted various objects that contained elements in a face-like pattern representative of two eyes and a mouth. When upright, the images resemble faces but they do not appear as face-like when inverted because the facial pattern is disrupted. We were interested in whether infants would prefer the upright images for their resemblance to faces in the upright orientation. Previous research indicated infants’ attention to and preference for face-like patterns in schematic stimuli. We investigated whether infants would respond similarly to face-like patterns in more complex stimuli. Past research supports that infants prefer, more easily recognize, and pay more attention to face-like stimuli when upright versus inverted. Thus, we hypothesized that if infants were able to perceive these complex images as face-like, they would look longer at the upright versions. INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF FACE-LIKE OBJECTS 7