Recognition of Mother's Photographed Face by the Three-Month-Old Infant

1981/06/01 by Maria E. Barrera, Daphne Maurer · 13 citations
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Face Recognition and Perception #Memory Processes and Influences

paper · doi:10.2307/1129196

Abstract

BARRERA, MARIA E., and MAURER, DAPHNE. Recognition of Mother's Photographed Face by the Three-Month-Old Infant. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 714-716. We used the visual preference and habituation paradigms to investigate the ability of 3-month-olds to recognize the photographed face of the mother and to discriminate it from another face. Infants discriminated between the pictures of the mother and a stranger, both in the preference test and in the recognition test after habituation. These findings suggest that, at least by 3 months of age, infants can recognize something about the mother's face in a picture. Initially, infants preferred the mother's face, but modified their preference after repeated exposure to her photograph. Thus, an infant's preference for an object may depend on the amount of exposure he has had to it, and may reflect different stages of recognition.

Cited by

• More is not always better: Audiovisual speech hampers infants’ face recognition
• Is it life or is it Memorex? Video as a representation of reality
• Infants' scanning of dynamic faces during the first year. [europepmc]
• Longitudinal and concurrent links between memory span, anxiety symptoms, and subsequent executive functioning in young children. [europepmc]
• The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective. [europepmc]
• Are 6-month-old human infants able to transfer emotional information (happy or angry) from voices to faces? An eye-tracking study. [europepmc]
• Auditory⁻Visual Matching of Conspecifics and Non-Conspecifics by Dogs and Human Infants. [europepmc]
• Pupil responses to dynamic negative facial expressions of emotion in infants and parents. [europepmc]
• Do Young Children of the "Selfie Generation" Understand Digital Photos as Representations? [europepmc]
• Dialogic Book-Sharing as a Privileged Intersubjective Space. [europepmc]
• Infant visual preference for the mother's face and longitudinal associations with emotional reactivity in the first year of life. [europepmc]
• The origins and development of aesthetics. [europepmc]
• Variations in face experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic affect infants' preference for their mother's face. [europepmc]

Related

• Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: Actions are more salient than faces.
• How Infants Direct Their Gaze to Faces in the Presence of Other Objects: The Development of Face Preference Between 4 and 7 Months After Birth
• The enduring legacy of newborns’ face preference.
• Infants' individuation of human faces across race and identity
• Attention and Memory for Faces and Actions in Infancy: The Salience of Actions over Faces in Dynamic Events