Newborns’ recognition of changing and unchanging aspects of schematic faces

Abstract

The present study investigated newborns’ ability to discriminate, recognize, and learn visual information embedded in the schematic face-like patterns preferred at birth. Four experiments were carried out using the visual-paired comparison paradigm. Results indicated that newborns discriminated face-like stimuli relying on their internal features (Experiments 1 and 4) and recognized a perceptual invariance between face-like configurations in conditions of low (Experiment 2) and high-perceptual variability (Experiment 3) of their inner elements. Altogether, data show that the presence of the preferred structure that schematically defines a face, displaying a triplet of elements in the correct locations for eyes and mouth, does not constitute a limit that constrains newborns’ face learning processes.