Face Processing in Infants and Importance in Future Understanding

Understanding how infants look at the world and things in it can be beneficial in different ways. Knowing how infants can distinguish between faces or objects, and how connectivity of this face processing works can greatly influence later research. Despite being so young, they can differentiate whether something they are shown is an object or a face. Also, trying to figure out how these infants see the world can better help when trying to understand how brain regions are connected, along with how this can help people in the future.

In the article “Face-sensitive brain responses in the first year of life,” Maggie Guy and colleagues investigated face processing in infants between the ages of 4.5 months and 12 months. Processing of faces can be seen when looking at cortical areas in the ventral visual pathway. The N290 component of ERP, along with the P2, P400 and Nc, displays specificity for human components. The ERP responses the infants had when looking at pictures of faces and objects were looked at. The P1 and N290 components responses were bigger for faces rather than objects. The P400 amplitude was not particular towards either, while the Nc was different, but was more impacted by the attentional state of the infant. There are changes that occur in the ERP responses during the first year of a person’s life. Also, attention is seen as important when trying to differentiate faces and objects. Maggie Guy spends time talking about infants with autism, and how looking at face processing can help find it and understand it.

In the article “Born Ready: Babies Are Prewired to Perceive the World,” Simon Makin addressed the study done by Daniel Dilkes and his colleagues that included infants between the ages of 6 days to 57 days. They found that both the occipital face area and the fusiform face area respond to faces, while parahippocampal place area and retrosplenial complex respond for scenes. A resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) technique was used on the infants while they were sleeping to measure the level of synchronization of activity to see the connection between different brain regions. Face regions were found to be connected greatly to each other but not connected to scene regions. It was mentioned how this processing could also help give better insight into people with autism.

Both studies can be beneficial when looking at how face processing relates to people who have certain disorders like autism. They talk about how the research could help with earlier diagnosis of autism. It was mentioned how siblings of kids who have autism could be looked at in order to see if connectivity in face regions could foresee the condition. This is important because usually it is not diagnosed until two or older. It helps to not only maybe earlier diagnose it, but also to hopefully better understand the disorder. 

Citations

Conte, S., Richards, J. E., Guy, M. W., Xie, W., & Roberts, J. E. (2020). Face-sensitive brain responses in the first year of life. NeuroImage,211, 116602. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116602

Makin, S. (2020, March 02). Born ready: Babies are prewired to perceive the world. Retrieved May 03, 2021, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/born-ready-babies-are-prewired-to-perceive-the-world/