CAREER: Asymmetries in Infant Processing of Faces-Origins and Implications

婴儿似乎并不认为人脸有什么特别之处；例如，它们能很好地识别直立和倒立的脸，也能很好地识别人和猴子的脸。然而，一年后，婴儿识别直立的人脸比识别倒置的人脸或猴子的脸要好得多。据推测，这与婴儿在一岁时对直立的人脸有更多的经验有关。经验的另一个不对称是，婴儿通常看到的女性面孔多于男性面孔；平均而言，婴儿在第一年的互动中有70%是与女性进行的。这种经验上的不对称应该会影响婴儿感知面孔、识别面孔、了解女性和男性以及扫描面孔的方式。尽管对婴儿面部加工的研究已经进行了40多年，但婴儿对女性和男性面部加工的可能差异却很少受到关注。同样，大多数研究都使用白人女性的面部作为刺激，因此显著的不对称会引起对婴儿面部感知的普遍性的警告。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）职业奖的资助下，Rennels博士将探索婴儿在对人脸产生特殊敏感性时所经历的变化的本质。在一系列的实验中，Rennels博士将研究以下问题：婴儿如何在不同的年龄代表面孔；越来越多的男性面孔经验如何影响对其他男性面孔的识别；婴儿对面孔-声音关系的知识，女性是否比男性更好；婴儿是否对女性面孔表现出相对于男性面孔的视觉偏好；以及婴儿是否比不喜欢的面孔更熟练地扫描喜欢的面孔。这些研究还将检验婴儿在熟悉的环境中（例如，当面孔来自熟悉的种族群体时）是否比在不熟悉的环境中（例如，当面孔来自不同的种族群体时）更有可能表现出对女性面孔的偏好和更熟练地扫描。这些研究将扩大对婴儿如何处理熟悉或不熟悉种族成员面孔的理解。除了这些研究目标，该项目还包括开发一门课程，让学生提出并实施以社区为基础的项目，通过应用心理学研究来促进社会正义。学生将了解如何利用心理学研究为社会服务。课程项目产生的积极成果应广泛影响学生和社区。

Young infants do not appear to perceive human faces as being special; for example, they recognize upright and inverted faces equally well, and human and monkey faces equally well. After the first year, however, infants recognize upright human faces much better than inverted faces, or the faces of monkeys. Presumably, this is related to the fact that during the first year infants have much more experience with upright human faces. Another asymmetry in experience is that infants typically see more female than male faces; on average, 70% of infants' interactions during the first year are with females. This asymmetry in experience should affect how infants perceive faces, recognize faces, learn about females and males, and scan faces. Despite a span of over 40 years of research in infant face processing, possible differences in infants' processing of female and male faces has received very little attention. Similarly, most studies have used the faces of Caucasian females as stimuli, so significant asymmetries would raise caveats regarding the generality of what is known about infant face perception.With funding by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Rennels will explore the nature of the changes that infants undergo as they develop special sensitivity to human faces. In a series of experiments, Dr. Rennels will examine such questions as how infants represent faces at various ages, how increased experience with male faces affects recognition of other male faces, whether infants' knowledge of face-voice relations is better for females than it is for males, whether infants express visual preferences for female faces relative to male faces, and whether infants more expertly scan preferred faces than they do non-preferred faces. These studies will also examine whether infants are more likely to demonstrate preferences for and more expertly scan female faces in familiar contexts (e.g., when the faces are from a familiar racial group) than unfamiliar contexts (e.g., when the faces are from different racial groups). These studies will broaden understanding of how infants process faces of members of familiar or unfamiliar races. In addition to these research goals, the project includes development of a course in which students propose and implement community-based projects that promote social justice through application of psychological research. Students will gain an understanding of how psychology research can be used to serve the community. Positive outcomes resulting from the course projects should broadly impact the students and community.