Introduction
There are many aspects of the development of human beings that developmental psychology tries to access. Because we are unsure of exactly when facial perception develops and how it changes over time, developmental psychology research and studies have been conducted to gain more insight into facial perception. Throughout this paper, I will be discussing two studies concerning facial perception, one performed on monkey babies, and one performed on human infants. I will give a summary of the findings of the two studies and then compare and contrast them.
Summary – Face Perception in Monkeys Reared With No Exposure to Faces
The purpose of this experiment was to gain more insight into when and how facial recognitions develop. It arose from a disagreement among researchers concerning whether facial recognition is a special perceptual process that is organized in an individual at birth or it arises from a general-purpose perceptual system in the individual and becomes more and more fine-tuned after frequent visual experiences (See Sugita, p. 394). To conduct the experiment, infant monkeys were deprived of seeing faces or face-like stimuli; the monkeys were taken away from their mothers at birth and their human caregivers worn masks. However, these infant monkeys were exposed to a number of other colorful stimuli. The period of deprivation from seeing faces was either 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months. After the deprivation period, the monkeys were tested to see if they could discriminate between familiar faces and new faces.
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The study found that the infant monkeys possessed an extremely significant ability to process faces even though they were deprived of seeing faces or face-like stimuli for a significant period of time. Furthermore, the infant monkeys seemed to possess no preference for either human or monkey faces and viewed both for the same period of time, unlike the control animals who seemed to have a preference for monkey faces. These results support the proposition that some information of facial characteristics is possessed in infants from birth. In addition, the monkeys that were not deprived of faces could not differentiate between new and familiar human faces. Furthermore, the deprived monkeys that were exposed to human faces first preferred human faces and the deprived monkeys exposed to monkey faces first preferred monkey faces. After approximately one year, the ability to differentiate between the face the monkey was exposed to second had formed.
Summary – Face Perception During Early Infancy
In this study human newborns were tested as well as 6 weeks olds and at 12 weeks olds to their preference for faces over non-face-like stimuli. To conduct the study, researchers used five cards, three that depicted face and non-face stimuli and two control stimuli cards. The infants’ preferences were denoted by which image they looked at first and the length of time they looked on each card. The study concluded that newborns were predisposed to look toward faces. Additionally, the study found that increasing cortical influence directed newborns to look at faces. In addition, newborns preferred the config possibly because they had not development enough to reject the crude depiction of a face. 6 and 12 week olds preferred the phase face, whereas newborns preferred the amplitude face. Newborns and 6 week olds displayed no preference for the contrast or the reversal, however, 12 week old all preferred the positive contrast.
Compare and Contrast
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of the changes that occur in humans over their lifetime; in essence, it is the scientific study of how humans ‘develop.’ These contributed to the study of developmental psychology by trying to assess when facial recognition processes are developed. Though both of these studies studied the preference for faces, the study with the infant monkeys was more developed. This is probably because researchers were no willing to deprive human babies of faces for an extended period of time. The animal study did more to determine when facial recognition processes were developed, whereas the study with the human infant only looked at whether or not babies had a preference for faces. The human children were not tested to see whether they preferred faces of the same species over faces of other species. Furthermore, they were not tested to see if they could differentiate between familiar faces and new faces. Both studies concluded that the monkey infants and the human infants had a preference for faces. Because the monkey babies were shown to possess an extremely high ability to process faces, one may conclude that they would have all preferred the phase face and the positive contract. However, the monkey babies were older that the human babies at the time of their testing, and the older human babies did prefer the phase face and positive contrast.
The most significant difference in the methodologies used is that the human babies were not deprived of seeing faces. The way in which the human babies were tested included the use of cards with images that bore a different level of resemblance to faces whereas the monkeys were tested using actual faces. The monkey were also tested to see which species of faces they preferred and whether they could tell the difference between new and familiar faces. Therefore, the monkey facial recognition ability was tested whereas the human babies’ ability to identify a picture of a face was tested. Because the testing of the animal babies was more in depth, it help to contribute to the understanding of the ability to differentiate between faces. The research, however, fails to answer the question of what facial features babies/humans prefer – whether or not they have a preference for features similar to their own. The research simply concluded that babies prefer faces.
- Mondloch, C. J., Lewis, T. L., Budreau, D. R., Maurer, D., Dannemiller, J. L., Stephens, B. R., Kleiner-Gathercoal, K. A. “Face Perception During Infancy.” American Psychology
Society. Vol. 10, No. 5, September 1999. - Sugita, Y. “Face Perception in Monkeys Reared with No Exposure to Faces.” PNAS. Vol. 105. No. 1. January 8, 2008. Pp. 394-398.
