Abstract
In adult studies, caricature effect has been reported. For example, adults can identify more quickly face caricatures, which were produced by exaggerating all metric differences between a face and a norm, than veridical line drawings and anti-caricatures (Rhodes et al., 1987). These caricature advantages were found only in familiar face recognition (Rhodes & Moody, 1990). These findings suggest that we encoded familiar faces as distinctive feature deviations from a norm, and our representation of familiar faces are schematized and exaggerated like caricatures. The current study examined whether infants would show the caricature effect in familiar face recognition. We used a preferential looking procedures to investigate the discrimination between their own mother's face and stranger's face in infants aged 6 to 8 months. We presented infants' own mother's face and a stranger's face side by side, and tested their visual preference for mother's face than a stranger's face in the three conditions; photographs, caricatures, and line drawings. We analyzed the data only in infants who showed the preference for their own mother's face in photographs. We found that 7- and 8-month-old infants maintained significant preference for their own mother's face than a stranger's face in caricatures (p < .05), but not in line drawings. On the other hand, 6-month-old infants did not show any preference for their own mother's face both in caricatures and line drawings. In sum, 7- and 8-month-old infants, but not 6-month-old infants, showed the caricature effect in recognition of their own mother's face. Our results suggest that the ability to utilize exaggerated features to recognize familiar faces would develop around 7 months of age.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016