Are faces special to infants? An investigation of configural and featural processing for the upper and lower regions of houses in 3- to 7-month-olds

Abstract

Three- to 7-month-olds were administered a house version of the Face Dimensions Test in which the featural and configural properties of the upper and lower windows were systematically varied. The Dimensions Test has previously been used to study the processing of face features and their configurations by infants (Quinn & Tanaka, 2009). Just as was the case with faces, infants were shown to be sensitive to configural change in the upper and lower regions and to featural change in the upper region, but not to featural change in the lower region. The outcomes reflect either a face processing system that can generalize broadly to stimuli that are as different from faces as houses or a more general processing system with perceptual operations that can apply to both faces and houses.

Keywords:

• Face perception
• Infancy
• Object perception

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NIH Grant HD-46526. The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and Laurie A. Yarzab for assistance in testing infants.