Exploring mechanisms underlying face learning in infants and adults

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Faces provide a wealth of information about other people, including their identity, gender, age, ethnicity, and emotional state. The ability to perceive this information is critical for social interactions. Adults are considered face “experts” we remember thousands of individual faces, we use specialized processing mechanisms that apply to faces but not other visual stimuli, and we have neural systems that are preferentially tuned to faces compared to other objects. However, in some ways we may not be face experts. Most face perception studies examine the ability to distinguish between two identities, using tightly controlled stimuli for example, pictures of faces where hair is removed, faces are presented against a uniform background, and lighting is the same. In these studies, adults do look like experts. However, when studies of face recognition are more similar to tasks that adults must perform everyday (e.g., recognizing your new colleague when you see her at the grocery store), adults do not perform like experts. Specifically, when adults see unfamiliar faces that vary naturally e.g., in lighting, viewpoint, facial expression, hairstyle, background context they have difficulty determining that two different images represent the same person. However, we do not have the same problem when we have to recognize familiar faces we are able to recognize people we know well across this kind of natural variability. The key question motivating the proposed studies is: How do unfamiliar faces become familiar? That is, upon encountering a new face, how do we form a robust and stable representation of that face that allows us to recognize the face across natural variability? The proposed research will combine behavioural, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological techniques to address these questions in adults and infants. Eye-tracking will allow us to determine how infants' and adults' patterns of attention change as they are learning a face, and how those patterns of attention predict how well we are able to recognize novel images of that face. EEG will allow us to examine how neural representations of familiar and unfamiliar faces differ in both adults and infants. This program of research will make important theoretical contributions to our understanding of face recognition and its development. It will also make important practical contributions. There are numerous professions where face recognition in particular, the ability to recognize faces across variability is critical (e.g., border officials who have to determine if the picture on an ID card is the same person standing in front of them). Understanding the factors that lead to better face recognition performance under real-world conditions can inform training in these professions. Additionally, findings from the proposed studies may lay the foundation for applied research with developing populations who display face recognition deficits (e.g., autism spectrum disorders).