Perhaps even more surprising is that infants prefer the faces of their own race by three months of age, and have trouble distinguishing between faces of other races by nine months. However, this also leads to infants’ developing preferences for certain faces or an inability to identify some others.įor example, shortly after birth, infants show a preference for looking at faces judged by adults to be “attractive” over “unattractive” faces.Īnd one-year-olds even behave differently around people with more attractive faces, smiling and playing more with attractive adults than with unattractive adults.īabies choose to be with people they consider more attractive. This rapidly developing ability to identify different faces and facial expressions is of huge value for infants. But they happily approach new toys when mothers show a smiling face. Similarly, toddlers avoid new toys when mothers pose a fearful facial expression toward them. They attempt to descend the slope only when their mothers offer an encouraging smile they refuse when their mothers discourage them from going. Mike Liu, CC BY-SAĪround eight to 12 months of age, infants learn that they can use information from other people’s faces – especially their mom’s – to help them figure out what to do in new situations.įor example, when infants who are first learning to crawl and walk are presented with a possibly dangerous slope, they look to their mothers’ facial expressions for cues.
Infants learn what to do, just by looking at mom’s face. Nevertheless, infants’ expertise with facial expressions becomes an extremely valuable tool for learning in the second half of the first year. This preference does indeed attract them to faces early in life, but isn’t specific to faces until later on, after the infants gain more experience looking at faces. Others take a middle-of-the-road approach, demonstrating that newborns aren’t attracted to faces specifically, but instead prefer looking at any pattern that is top-heavy, having more “stuff” on top. Others suggest that the massive amount of experience newborns get with faces right away is enough to promote rapid learning. Some argue that infants have a biological predisposition to prefer faces right from birth. Researchers still aren’t sure how infants learn about faces so quickly. By five years, newborns’ ability to recognize and label facial expressions approaches the competence of most adults.
By the time infants are five months old, they will learn to match the image of an emotional expression (e.g., a sad face) with its corresponding vocal expression (i.e., a sad voice). This response to faces will continue to grow over time. Over the next few months, faces will become a newborn’s favorite stimulus as he or she acquires more and more expertise at identifying familiar faces. Only a few hours later, newborns will also become adept at differentiating between their mother’s face and the faces of strangers, looking longer at images of their own mothers than at images of another woman.Īnd within a matter of days, they will learn to discriminate between different emotional facial expressions, like happy, sad and surprised faces.
Newborns followed the paddles with images of faces on them for longer than paddles with scrambled faces. Researchers then moved the paddles along their line of sight.
To demonstrate this, researchers showed newborns who were only nine minutes old paddles that contained the image of a face or the image of a scrambled face.