Faces are important for non-verbal communication in daily life, and eye gaze direction provides important information for adult–infant interaction. Four-month-old infants and adults better recognize faces when accompanied with direct gaze, suggesting a special status of ‘eye contact.’ Whether mutual gaze plays a role in face recognition from birth, or whether it requires expertise, is investigated in this paper. We conducted a between subjects design, for a total of four experiments, […] to investigate newborns’ ability to recognize faces when gaze direction is manipulated. We predicted that a face accompanied with direct gaze would be better recognized by newborns. In contrast, we expected no evidence of identity recognition when newborns were familiarized with a face with averted gaze. According with our expectations, newborns were able to recognize a face identity when previously familiarized with direct gaze, but not with averted gaze. However, this effect was face identity-specific. Overall, our results suggest that direct gaze can modulate face processing and affects preferences and face identity learning in newborns.

{ Infant and Child Development | PDF }

oil on canvas { Mark Ryden }

eyes, kids | February 16th, 2013