The Representational Bias That Is Face-Specific - Essay Example

Are infants are born with a representational bias that is face specific? Grade (March 18th, Are infants are born with a representational bias that is face specific? Faces serves as the major visual stimuli features for infants, and the fact that they will have to meet many faces in the course of the infancy and through to childhood indicates the unique aspect of studying faces as important perception in infants development process (Walton & Bower, 1993). Facial perception is also a relevant aspect of infancy development, considering that it serves as a multidimensional stimulus, which provides a range of visual information for infants that have a great social significance (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983). The significance of facial perception in the lives of infants is that; it provides information regarding the familiarity of the individual that the infant sees, the mood, the direction of gaze and the identity of the individual’s race, enabling the infant to determine whether the individual is from an own-race or from a different race (Walton & Bower, 1993). The visual preference for faces by newborns and infants can be interpreted to indicate that they have a representational bias that are face specific. Conventional wisdom and many researches have indicated that face recognition is a process that develops slowly in infancy, throughout childhood to adolescence, and the main driver of the process is the perceptual experience (Slater, 2010). Therefore, experience shapes the face recognition abilities of infants a great deal, where the infants start with developing a preference for female and own-race faces in the first months of their lives. With time, the infants grow in their experience, and they are therefore better placed to start recognizing own-species faces as they progress through their childhood, and it is only when they have reached a certain stage of their childhood that children are able to fully recognize faces. In this respect, it is fundamental to understand that there is a high level of plasticity in the visual aspect of infants, which only develops with time depending on the level of exposure and experience (Law, 1997). In the first year of infant development, their faces become attuned to those faces that they are used to seeing regularly, and during this period, infants are able to define the gender, race and species-specific faces, while also being able to interpret other social cognitive aspects of the face such as attractiveness, moods and other face traits. The infant is then able to store this information as part of the most informative cognitive aspect throughout their childhood development, considering that such infants will now be comparing the new and different faces that they meet in the course of their growth and development, with the faces that they have seen regularly and stored the information in their brain (Reissland, 1988). Therefore, there is a strong argument that humans are born with a face bias, which then means that even within a few minutes after birth; infants are able to perceive the face individual holding them as the most cognitively recognizable stimulus. This way, the infants are able to start following the face within a short period of time after their birth, more than they are able to follow other artificial stimulus. Nevertheless, the facial bias concept of the infants visual system has been contested, with different theories advancing the view that, rather than the bias in facial perception, the infants are able to follow the faces they see early in their birth, due to the structural properties found on the face, which are easily recognizable by the functional properties of the newborns visual system (Law, 1997). In this respect, this theory serves to disapprove the view held by the first theory which argues for the existence of the face-specific bias in the visual system of infants at the time when they are born. The theory arguing for the existence of the functional properties of the infants’ visual system at the time they are born holds that the face is unique as a stimulus for the infants’ visual system, due to diverse reasons. First, the face moves in three directions, which makes the visual system of the infants to easily and quickly perceive the movement of the face, more than any other visual cognitive stimulus, which may not be moving in multiple directions at once. Secondly, there are very many aspects of contrast within the face, which then serves to present a multidimensional visual perception of the infant, considering that through the face, an infant can learn different components which functions differently, all at the same time (Slater, 1998). Taking for example the face of a mother who is looking at her infant and trying to show her a jovial face, she will apply several components of the face, such as the eye movements, the smile, and wrinkles on the front of the face, as well as swinging the head in different direction, thus having the face move variously. Under this single intention of indicating a jovial face, the mother will have incorporated different components of the face to express that single aspect, yet in very different modes. Consequently, the face becomes the most recognizable aspect of an infant’s early life, due to the multiplicity of its dimensions, components and contrasts which speak to a single theme. Thus, the visual system of the infant becomes more accustomed to the face, not due to any single bias associated with innate abilities of face-specific bias of an infant during birth, but due to the multiplicity of the facial components and contrasts, which are more perceivable and cognizable than any other aspect of cognitive visual stimulus (Leman, Bremner, Parke & Gauvain, 2012). Further, as opposed to the other cognitive stimulus features that can be used to stimulate the visual system of the infant, the face has both internal and external features. This means that the change of the face from the external to the internal features is another aspect that serves to attract the attention of the infants’ visual system, more than any other features of the cognitive stimulus components (Walton & Bower, 1993). This way, the visual system of the infants is able to perceive the face and recognize its transformation from the internal to the external features application, or the combination application of the internal and the external features at the same time. Thus, it is not due to the fact that the infant has a special bias towards face-specific innate cognitive abilities, but because the components of the face are more attractive to the visual system of the infants (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983). The concept of top-heaviness has been applied to defend the position that infants do not have a face-specific bias at birth. This concept provides that the visual system of the infants have a high preference for stimuli that have more elements on the upper part than on the lower parts (Walton & Bower, 1993). Further, this position also argues that the visual system of an infant is a component of the top-heaviness concept and the concept of congruency, such that the visual system of infants will be more attracted to the congruency that presents more elements on the upper part than on the lower part. In this respect, this position argues that when a feature congruent to the face is made and presented to the infant, where one of the feature has more of the facial components on the upper part while the other feature has more elements on the lower part, the infant will demonstrate a preference for the congruent facial feature that has more elements on the upper side (Walton & Bower, 1993). Nevertheless, the theory holding that infants are born with the innate ability to recognize faces more than any other visual cognitive features have applied various arguments to defend the position. According to this argument, infants are born with information regarding the structure of faces, found in the form of a face-detecting sub-cortical element embedded on the brain of infants (Reissland, 1988). The argument presents the face-detecting sub-cortical element as a component of three dark patches in the brain of an infant, which represents the two eyes and the mouth, and thus is applied towards directing the visual aspect of the newborn to the face (Leman, Bremner, Parke & Gauvain, 2012). Further, the theory advancing the proposition that infants are born with face-specific bias also advances another argument which holds that rather than being born with three abstract patches or dots embedded on the brains, infants have a more elaborate face-specific bias. Thus, this argument holds that infants are born with an intermodal matching mechanism, which enables them to imitate the facial expressions that are formed by the faces they see a short-while after they are born (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983). Therefore, the intermodal matching mechanism enables the infants to match what they can see with what they feel but they are not able see, where the faces of the other individuals holding them becomes what they can see, and their faces what they can feel but they cannot see. In this respect, the proposition holds that infants are born with a social identity function in the form of neural psychological machinery, which enables them to imitate what others are doing. This suggests that infants are born with an innate face-specific bias, which makes it possible for the infants to have a perception preference for the face, more than any other facial cognitive stimulus (Slater, 1998). Another complementary proposition reinforcing the view that infants are born with face-specific bias and innate abilities, holds that infants are born with mirror neurons, which resonates with the facial expression they see the other faces making, considering that the mirror neurons are particularly created to enable the infants visually perceive a congruent facial expression that is within their innate ability, and thus enable them to imitate the same (Reissland, 1988). Therefore, the mirror neurons that are created within an infant fires similar response within an infant, the moment the infant’s visual system perceives such facial expressions that they are coded to mimic. Eventually, the mirror neurons gives a replication of the move started by the facial expression of the individual holding the infant, an aspect that makes the infant more attracted to the face than any other visual cognitive stimulus, since they have a similar innate ability to equally respond to the facial gesture, more than any other stimulus (Law, 1997). Additionally, a proposition suggesting that the face-specific bias of an individual goes beyond mere intermodal matching mechanism argues on the basis of facial attraction preference. The standards preference of beauty is a concept holding that infants are born with the abilities to perceive and react towards to the beauty of facial expressions, which is more attractive than any other form of cognitive visual stimuli (Reissland, 1988). In this respect, the argument for this proposition has been that infants are only able to perceive and recognize beautiful and attractive facial expressions such as smiles and bright eyes projection during their very tender age, while being indifferent to the normal or the non-attractive facial expressions. This proposition holds for infants who are three-days old and below, who have been observed to be only responsive to the facial expressions that are beautiful and attractive (Walton & Bower, 1993). Nevertheless, this proposition has been challenged by the observation that infants become more and more cognizant of other facial expressions that may not be attractive in the cause of their development. This raises the question of what changes in the innate attractive and beautiful cognitive ability of the infants, which then transforms and becomes multidimensional perception ability, perceiving both the attractive and the non-attractive faces (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983). Further, this proposition is challenged by the observation that infants who are three-days old and below only respond to the attractive faces that are upright and not inverted, while also only responding to the beautiful faces that attract the attention of the infants towards the internal, rather than the external feature. This observation again raises the question of this disparity in beauty recognition, rendering this proposition highly questionable (Leman, Bremner, Parke & Gauvain, 2012). Additionally, the attractive face proposition has been challenged by the observation that the visual attention of infants is mostly attracted to the female, regular, own-race and own-species faces, as opposed to the other faces, despite the projection of similar attractive facial expressions towards the infants (Slater, 1998). In this case, if infants had a face-specific bias for attractive and beautiful faces, there could not be any distinction between the regular faces and the strange faces that the infants have seen, for as long as they are forming the attractive and beautiful expressions (Reissland, 1988). Thus, it becomes possible to challenge the attractive perception theory of the infants as not completely plausible. References Law, A (Producer). (1997). Babies Minds [Television series epsiode]. In ED209 Child Development. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Law, A (Producer). (1997). Simple Beginnings [Television series epsiode]. In ED209 Child Development. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Leman, P., Bremner, A., Parke, R. & Gauvain, M. (2012). Developmental Psychology. London McGraw-Hill. Meltzoff A.N. & Moore M.K. (1983). Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures. Child Development. 1983;54:702–709. Reissland N. (1988). Neonatal imitation in the 1st hour of life—Observations in rural Nepal. Developmental Psychology 24, 464–469. Slater, A. et al. (2010). The shaping of the face space in early infancy: Becoming a native face processor. Child Development Perspective, 4, 205-211. Slater A, et al (1998). Newborn infants prefer attractive faces. Infant Behavior and Development 21:345-354. Walton GE & Bower T. (1993). Newborns form prototypes in less than 1 minute. Psychological Science 4, 203-205. Read More