Facial Recognition

Facial recognition is an important aspect of our everyday lives and something we do constantly, often without much thought. However, where did we learn this skill, and how? Research by Dixon et al. entitled, “Neural correlates of individuation and categorization of other-species faces in infancy” explores these questions and goes into depth looking at how familiarization effects subordinate level categorization of the faces of other species with infants that are nine months old. From the beginning, infants have a bias for faces and face like patterns. More specifically, they gain a preference for their mother’s face over others, and attractive versus unattractive faces. There is evidence that shows that prior to six months of age, infants are able to broadly process faces, both human and human like, for example monkey faces. However, as they continue to age they experience perceptual narrowing, and start to become less sensitive to non native stimuli. At nine months, an infant will show a preference for human faces, and no preference for monkey faces. However at this age, when the babies are familiarized with a specific set of monkey faces, they show signs of recognition and are better able to distinguish between a ‘novel-same’ and a ‘novel- other’ monkey face. When babies were exposed to these monkey faces, they somewhat preserved their ability to better distinguish between the different types of faces within this monkey facial group. As babies continue to age and perceptual narrowing continues, they in turn get worse at processing and distinguishing between the types of faces that they do not typically see, for example the faces of those races not in their immediate environment.

The article, “How Children Learn to Recognize Faces” written by journalist and pediatrician Perri Klass and published in the New York Times talks about this phenomenon, and how this results in the creation of the other race effect. Child development is based on social experiences. Therefore, babies improve in identifying faces within their own racial groups or the race of those that are raising them, and decrease in their ability to do so with other racial groups. However, when infants are raised in homes and environments that are not racially homogenous, they become better at recognizing the faces of those other races as well. Additionally, while face perception has a very critical nurture aspect, it is based on nature as well. Children in their first years of life with vision problems, even if they are later fixed, may have missed the window of opportunity for learning the skill of facial recognition and may never be able to learn it later in life. A disorder that can result from this is called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. People with prosopagnosia are unable to recognize individuals regardless of how well they may know someone. According to Doctor Kang Lee, professor of applied psychology and human development interviewed for this article, people define faces in two types of ways, using feature formation and configural information. Young children rely heavily on feature formation in order to identify a face. For example, defining features could be the shape of their parents nose, the size of their eyes, or whether or not they have facial hair. This is why children get confused and may not be able to identify an individual if one of these defining features changes, possibly their father shaving his beard or someone removing their glasses. Configural information on the other hand has to do with the structure of the face. An example of this could be the distance between someone's eyes, and we become extremely good at identifying people this way. Due to the fact that these features do not change much as one ages, one will likely be able to recognize a friend years after not seeing them. While this way of identifying faces is very effective, this skill is not fully developed until the teen years.

Works Cited

Klass, Perri. “How Children Learn to Recognize Faces.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 29 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/well/family/how-children-learn-to-recognize-faces.html?searchResultPosition=1.

Dixon, K. C., Reynolds, G. D., Romano, A. C., Roth, K. C., Stumpe, A. L., Guy, M. W., & Mosteller, S. M. (2019). Neural correlates of individuation and categorization of other- species faces in infancy. Neuropsychologia, 126, 27–35. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/13j3ka06799we8d/AADhrxtnxeCFSnirlRdlnxzIa/(10.15.19)%20-%20Greg%20Reynolds?dl=0&preview=Dixon+Reynolds+et+al_2019.pdf&subfolder_nav_tracking=1