How experience influences infants’ recognition of male and female faces

Young infants with female primary caregivers are able to differentiate familiar female faces from novel female faces but not male faces. Experience processing faces may be important for being able to discriminate among similar-looking faces. Subsequently, increasing infants’ experience with less familiar faces should improve their ability to differentiate those types of faces. This study examined if infants’ experience with faces affected their recognition of new faces. Prior to testing, 2-3 month old infants were assigned to one of three conditions: a male video, a female video, and no video condition. Infants were familiarized to both male and female faces during test. For the male faces, infants who saw the male video showed a familiarity preference, infants who saw the female video showed a novelty preference, and infants who saw no video showed no preference. For female faces, infants showed no preference when assigned to the male video and no video condition, while infants assigned to the female video (n = 5) showed a familiarity preference. A follow up infant-controlled habituation study tested if infants processed faces featurally or holistically. During testing, infants saw one familiar face, one composite face, and one novel face. None of the infants in the male video, female video, or no video conditions were able to distinguish the familiar face from the composite face. Only infants in the female video condition showed an increase in looking time from the familiar face to the novel face