Abstract
Our recent study showed that six- to eight-month-old?infants could learn the three-dimensional face in static presentation of different viewpoint images but not in the presentation of sequentially rotating images (Yamashita et al., VSS 2010). In this experiment, we presented rotating face with gaze, in the condition participants perceived the averted gaze according face rotating. It should make a difficulty in face learning especially for infants. The direction another person's eyes are looking tells us the direction towards which the person is paying his or her attention. Previous study shows that response time of adult participants for detection of the gaze direction is faster when the eyes and the head were congruently oriented, than when they were incongruently oriented (Seyama et al., 2005). Here we investigated developmental influence of the gaze direction using the artificially-produced faces. In our experiment, we presented the artificially-produced in rotating face whose face and the gazes were congruent orientation or incongruent orientation. In the former condition we could perceive rotating face with averted gaze, and in the latter condition we could perceive the rotating face with direct gaze. For both condition, sixty-one sequential images of each face were created by rotating an axis perpendicular to the visual axis connecting the viewer's eyes and the face from frontal view to plus-minus 30 deg. Six- to eight-month-old infants participated in the present study and compared their performance in two conditions. Results showed that only 8-month-old infants learned the face in incongruent but not in congruent condition. This result suggests that the gaze direction may affect the 3D face learning.
This research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (21243041, 20119002) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.