Facial Recognition In Infants Essay

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Facial Recognition Ability in Infants A common area of perception that many may not think about is the ability to recognize faces. Facial recognition, however, is not consistent from infancy to adulthood but develops throughout an individual’s life. During infancy, the ability to see detail is quite poor compared to the average adult (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2017). When objects are within close distances, studies have shown that infants are able to perceive and detect a few features of the object; this idea can then be related to facial recognition in infants (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2017). The details that infants are able to perceive are associated with contrast in light, especially the difference between dark and light areas. Though this does …show more content…

This study was conducted by showing the infants videos that depicted discriminable individuals doing repetitive tasks, such as brushing their teeth (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). The faces of the individuals doing these tasks were oriented in three different ways: left, right, and center. The infants were exposed to the same video action to help them get familiar with the action. Once familiarization was complete, the infants were exposed to the familiar stimulus and a novel stimulus of the same action (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). The results for this experiment showed that the infants who had a longer period of time being familiarized with a video were able to discriminate between faces when shown with an action than those with a shorter familiarization time period (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). These findings can help conclude that infants have poor facial recognition when only presented with faces, but the recognition can be improved when the faces are associated with a certain, familiar action (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). Lastly, further research has been conducted that relates to the specificity of species with facial recognition in

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