Personal familiarity influences the processing of upright and inverted faces in infants.
Personal familiarity influences the processing of upright and inverted faces in infants.
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Date
2010
Authors
Balas, B
Nelson, C. A.
Westerlund, A
Vogel-Farley, V
Riggins, T
Kuefner, D
Advisor
Citation
Balas, B., Nelson, C. A., Westerlund, A., Vogel-Farley, V., Riggins, T., & Kuefner, D. (2010). Personal familiarity influences the processing of upright and inverted faces in infants. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, 1-6.
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Abstract
Infant face processing becomes more selective during the fi rst year of life as a function of
varying experience with distinct face categories defi ned by species, race, and age. Given that
any individual face belongs to many such categories (e.g. A young Caucasian man’s face) we
asked how the neural selectivity for one aspect of facial appearance was affected by category
membership along another dimension of variability. 6-month-old infants were shown upright and
inverted pictures of either their own mother or a stranger while event-related potentials (ERPs)
were recorded. We found that the amplitude of the P400 (a face-sensitive ERP component) was
only sensitive to the orientation of the mother’s face, suggesting that “tuning” of the neural response to faces is realized jointly across multiple dimensions of face appearance.