Do infants use a generalised motion processing system for discriminating facial motion?

Janine Spencer
Justin O'Brien
Harold C. Hill, University of Wollongong
Alan Johnston

Article comments

Spencer, J, O'Brien, J, Hill, HC & Johnston, A, Do infants use a generalised motion processing system for discriminating facial motion?, Perception 34 ECVP Abstract Supplement, 2005, p 171, United Kingdom: Pion Ltd.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that infants aged 4 to 8 months can perceive and discriminate facial motion (Spencer et al, 2004 Perception 33 Supplement, 56). Here we report a study in which we used an animated average face to test infants' ability to discriminate viewpoint invariance of biological facial motion. We familiarised infants with the animated face using one motion sequence of an actor telling a joke. The stimulus was either a full-face view (0°) or a face rotated 60° about a vertical axis (between full-face and profile). Once familiarised, infants were presented with two stimuli. One was the same as the habituation stimulus, shown at a different angle. The other was a novel motion sequence drawn from a different actor telling a different joke. Infants demonstrated a significant preference for the novel motion sequence, suggesting that they were able to encode the face-based motion in a viewpoint-invariant manner. However, in a parallel study of identical design but using inverted stimuli, infants did not demonstrate a face-inversion effect. This indicates that infants were using a general motion-processing system to discriminate between the sequences rather than a face-specific process.