The emergence of cognitive specialization in infancy: The case of face preference

Recent studies suggest that newborns’ face preference might be explained as the result of the combined effect of non-specific perceptual constraints that stem from the general properties of visual processing shortly after birth (Simion et al. 2001, 2003) rather than by an innate mechanism triggered by the specific structure of the face (Johnson and Morton 1991). In particular, it has been demonstrated that a perceptual property, which is defined by the presence of more patterning in the upper than in the lower part of the configuration, determines newborns’ preference in the case of both geometric stimuli (Simion et al. 2002) and faces (Macchi Cassia et al. 2004; Turati et al. 2002). Based on these results, the present study was aimed at testing whether the same general biases that induce face preference at birth still operate and explain face preference in 3-month-old infants. In order to address this issue, newborns (Experiment 1) and 3-month-old infants (Experiment 2) were presented with pairs of stimuli composed of a natural face and a scrambled face. The scrambled face had more elements in the top portion than the natural face. Results indicated that, while newborns preferred the scrambled face, at 3 months of age infants preferred the face over the non-face image. These findings appear relevant to the issue of how face processing emerges as a specialized ability during development, suggesting that signs of a process of cognitive specialization for faces are already present in 3-month-old infants.