Face Perception In Infants

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Face perception constitutes a major aspect of sensory/perceptual development in the growth of an infant (Gauthier & Nelson, 2001). Over a two-month span of time, Chris’s attention to faces has increased immensely, allowing him to engage in a greater amount and wider variety of social interactions. Chris’s heightened attention to human faces over the course of his development affords him a wealth of social information from other people, thereby facilitating his communication skills within the realms of social-emotional and linguistic development. In order to establish the implications of attention to faces for communication, the basic functions of face perception must first be reviewed. For infants, faces are a vital resource of social information from others, particularly caregivers; caregivers adapt their communicative behavior to infants’ needs, engaging in “baby talk,” such as exaggerated facial expressions, that encourage a reciprocation of communication in the infant (Fernald, 1984). The affective communication system is comprised of coordinated interactions between infant and another human, usually the caregiver (Tronick, 1989). It is well established that picking up on these facial cues is essential to the infant’s communication and relationships with others. A classic experiment by Brazelton and colleagues (1975), the still face experiment, revealed that when mothers exhibited unusually neutral faces, infants displayed high levels of distress, because emotional expression comes to be expected from the caregiver. Face processing is a skill so adaptive for gathering necessary social information that the human species has evolved to develop it early in life; even newborns prefer facelike stimuli (Mondloch et al., …show more content…

For example, Chris demonstrates emotional communication through interaction with another

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