Face Perception and Cognition

• Philosophical views address the nature versus nurture debate regarding cognitive development in Nativism vs. Empiricism.

Empiricism vs. Nativism

• Empiricism is associated with nurture, suggesting knowledge comes from experience.
• John Locke (1690) believed the mind starts as a blank slate, being an Empiricist.
• William James (1890) described infant experience as a "great blooming, buzzing confusion", taking an Empiricist viewpoint.
• Nativism suggests knowledge and abilities are innate, genetically programmed, and not learned.

Core Knowledge Hypothesis

• Humans possess innate cognitive capacities for language learning, quantitative reasoning, spatial reasoning, understanding objects, and understanding people according to Spelke, Carey, and Baillargeon.
• Core abilities and general learning skills form the foundation for the development of human cognition.

Face Perception

• Faces are key to learning and predicting others' actions.
• The ability to perceive, distinguish, and remember faces is crucial for social interaction.
• Researchers study how these face processing skills arise and whether abilities are innate or shaped by experience.

Mature Face Processing System

• The system is specialized for processing, recognizing, and remembering faces.
• Faces need to be differentiated from objects and scenes
• Individual faces need to be distinguished and remembered
• Complex social cues for interaction need to be distinguished i.e. emotion
• Specialization means having a distinct way of processing faces rather than using general perception or memory.
• Inversion and configuration are evidence for a specialized system
• Face selective cortical regions like the fusiform face area (FFA) are evidence for a specialized system
• Face perception can be deficit specific as seen in prosopagnosia
• Own-race bias is also an evidence for a specialized system.
• Specialization down to the level of single cells means the cells can be tuned to particular faces
• There is evidence for species specificity

Origins of face specialization

• Mature brains are specialized to process, recognize, and discriminate faces, but it is not clear whether this sensitivity is present from birth, develops through experience, or appears later in life.

Newborn Face Processing

• Newborns exhibit a preference for faces that are upright versus inverted.
• There is a preference for open eyes versus closed eyes, and a preference for direct gaze versus averted gaze.
• Configurations that resemble real faces are more attractive to infants compared to scrambled parts/non-faces.
• Exact configuration is crucial for adults, a developmental change occurs.
• Fetuses prefer upright configurations, suggesting there is no need for postnatal experience for configuration preference.
• General configuration and top-heaviness guide where to focus, exact configuration has to be developed.
• Preferences are present at birth/before suggests they do not arise from regular face experience.

Nurture's Role in Infant Face Perception

• Young infants are able to tell apart novel from familiar faces, thus can remember Individual faces.
• During the first year of life, perceptual narrowing happens where there is a preference for familiar faces.
• Over the first year, abilities are tuned to own race faces and to own familiar species.
• 6-month-old preferences rely on specific environment that the child is in, and not own-race.
• Extended experience changes pruning and narrowing for faces.
• If experimental groups read monkey faces every night, they retained their ability to discriminate between monkey faces.
• If the control group did not read the monkey faces every night, they lost the ability to discriminate between faces
• Overall, it is considered that face processing is a specialized system and is tuned through experience, and that is more experience-expectant

Clinical Implications of Face Processing

• Neglected orphans as well as children with autism or development prosopagnosia can impact basic face processing research for clinically developing children and education.

Prosopagnosia

• It is only because of basic science of face processing that we can discover, detect, and diangnose prosopagnosia
• We are able to use basic vision science psychophysics to test fro sensitivity and memory to faces
• Distinctions can be made between developement prosopagnosia and deficits obtained as result of brain damage

Autism

• Autism is defined as a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, impaired communication, and restrictive/receptive behaviors.
• 1 in 44 children have autism (CDC, 2018).
• Children with autism will display difficulty with maintaining eye contact, and appear uninterested in social interaction, they prefer geometric shapes or mechanical items over faces/social stimuli
• Those with autism spontaneously look at different parts of the face.
• Tend to spontaneously engage different brain regions as result of do not spontaneously engage fusiform face region.
• It has been seen that spontaneous face processing is different, such at they more often prefer to look at the face/the head, or that they tend not to often engage fusiform face regions.
• Studies are limited when using high funcitoning individual who are able to cooperate in experiments.
• The origins, or the implications of differential face-processing patterns are not fully understood.
• With eye tracking, we are able to look at movies with geometric patterns or children dancing to help with autism
• There is a greater preference for the video of the geometric patterns, with 100% of children classified as autism, it they watched this video more than 70% of the time
• Interest can be used when heightened for mechanical or geometric events to encourage face processing
• Methods are used such as the transporters show, or faces on trains encourage interest in faces

Social Deprivation in Romanian Orphans

• Romania had many unwanted institutionalized children and as of 2010 there was around 20,000.
• This resulted in a severe lack of physical / attention to these orphans, with ratiios of 1 caregiver to up to 20 infants.
• In turn, they spend a majority of the time laying in the crib without human contact
• This gives a natural experiment: Deprived of typical levls of face content and expression
• Those that were placed before 2 years had much better social and cognitive outcomes than those placed after 2 years
• Conclusion: Basic facial processing is relatively robust even when severe deprivation has been experienced.

Conclusions and Summary

• Humans start life with ability to distinguish between all faces, while gravitating towards some.
• Over the first year of life, the brain learns how to distinguish between types of faces and what to encounter and recognize.
• Studies of face processing is applicable to clinical and education settings.

Explore research on newborns' face preferences and the nature vs. nurture debate. Discusses findings from studies by Johnson et al. and Cassia et al., and compares empiricist and nativist perspectives on cognitive development.