The development of face perception in infancy: Intersensory interference and unimodal visual facilitation.

2012/12/17 by Lorraine E. Bahrick, Robert Lickliter, Irina Castellanos · 68 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Asynchronous communication #Audiology #Categorization, perception, and language #Cognitive psychology #Communication #Computer science #Developmental psychology #Face Recognition and Perception #Face perception #Facilitation #Multisensory perception and integration #Neuroscience #Perception #Psychology #Redundancy (engineering) #Speech perception #Speech recognition #Stimulus (psychology) #Visual perception

paper · open access · doi:10.1037/a0031238

published in Developmental Psychology 49(10), 1919-1930 (American Psychological Association)

openalex publication_date 2012/12/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, would be impaired in the context of intersensory redundancy provided by audiovisual speech and enhanced in the absence of intersensory redundancy (unimodal visual and asynchronous audiovisual speech) in early development. Later in development, following improvements in attention, faces should be discriminated in both redundant audiovisual and nonredundant stimulation. Results supported these predictions. Two-month-old infants discriminated a novel face in unimodal visual and asynchronous audiovisual speech but not in synchronous audiovisual speech. By 3 months, face discrimination was evident even during synchronous audiovisual speech. These findings indicate that infant face perception is enhanced and emerges developmentally earlier following unimodal visual than synchronous audiovisual exposure and that intersensory redundancy generated by naturalistic audiovisual speech can interfere with face processing.

Citations

• Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: Actions are more salient than faces.
• Attention and Memory for Faces and Actions in Infancy: The Salience of Actions over Faces in Dynamic Events
• Recognition of Moving and Static Faces by Young Infants
• Newborns' preferential tracking of face-like stimuli and its subsequent decline

Cited by

• More is not always better: Audiovisual speech hampers infants’ face recognition
• Intersensory redundancy hinders face discrimination in preschool children: evidence for visual facilitation. [europepmc]
• On the facilitative effects of face motion on face recognition and its development. [europepmc]
• The development of sensorimotor influences in the audiovisual speech domain: some critical questions. [europepmc]
• Learning to Attend Selectively: The Dual Role of Intersensory Redundancy. [europepmc]
• Eye tracking reveals a crucial role for facial motion in recognition of faces by infants. [europepmc]
• Intra sensory Redundancy Facilitates Infant Detection of Tempo: Extending Predictions of the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis. [europepmc]
• Enhanced attention to speaking faces versus other event types emerges gradually across infancy. [europepmc]
• Temporal Dependency and the Structure of Early Looking. [europepmc]
• The intersensory redundancy hypothesis: Extending the principle of unimodal facilitation to prenatal development. [europepmc]
• Sample size, statistical power, and false conclusions in infant looking-time research. [europepmc]
• The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective. [europepmc]
• Beyond the Bayley: Neurocognitive Assessments of Development During Infancy and Toddlerhood. [europepmc]
• Effects of motion and audio-visual redundancy on upright and inverted face and feature preferences in 4-13-month old pre- and full-term NICU graduates. [europepmc]
• Face Processing in Early Development: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies and Considerations in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic. [europepmc]
• Individual Differences in Multisensory Attention Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Predict Language and Symptom Severity: Evidence from the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP). [europepmc]
• Face-to-face contact during infancy: How the development of gaze to faces feeds into infants' vocabulary outcomes. [europepmc]
• Intersensory redundancy impedes face recognition in 12-month-old infants. [europepmc]
• Face processing in early development: a systematic review of behavioral studies and considerations in times of COVID-19 pandemic [europepmc]

Related

• More is not always better: Audiovisual speech hampers infants’ face recognition
• Emergence of Neural Face Selectivity in Infants Younger Than 4 Months Old
• Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: Actions are more salient than faces.
• Infants Experience Perceptual Narrowing for Nonprimate Faces
• Narrowing of intersensory speech perception in infancy