2008/01/01 by Lorraine E. Bahrick, Lisa C. Newell · 41 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognitive psychology #Context (archaeology) #Developmental psychology #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Face Recognition and Perception #Habituation #Neuroscience #Perception #Psychology #Salience (neuroscience)
paper · doi:10.1037/0012-1649.44.4.983
published in Developmental Psychology 44(4), 983-996 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2008/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Despite the fact that faces are typically seen in the context of dynamic events, there is little research on infants' perception of moving faces. L. E. Bahrick, L. J. Gogate, and I. Ruiz (2002) demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminate and remember repetitive actions but not the faces of the women performing the actions. The present research tested an attentional salience explanation for these findings: that dynamic faces are discriminable to infants, but more salient actions compete for attention. Results demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminated faces in the context of actions when they had longer familiarization time (Experiment 1) and following habituation to a single person performing 3 different activities (Experiment 2). Further, 7-month-old infants who have had more experience with social events also discriminated faces in the context of actions. Overall, however, discrimination of actions was more robust and occurred earlier in processing time than discrimination of dynamic faces. These findings support an attentional salience hypothesis and indicate that faces are not special in the context of actions in early infancy.