Abstract
Infants have a significant ability to perceive and recognize familiar faces. Even newborns prefer their mothers’ faces to those of strangers, and discriminate the two faces (e.g., Pascalis et al., 1995), and adult-like familiar face recognition- for example, the tolerance of image transformation and holistic processing (e.g., Kobayashi et al., 2020) in the perception of mother’s face- develops at around 7 months of age. Little is known, however, about development of representation of their mother’s face in infancy. To examine infants’ representation of their mother’s face, by assessing the caricature effect. The caricature effect refers to better recognition performance for familiar faces in caricatures, which are produced by exaggerating all metric differences between a face and a norm, than veridical depictions and anti-caricatures, which are produced by reducing all the differences between a face and a norm (Rhodes et al., 1987). This phenomenon suggest that adults represent familiar faces as distinctive feature deviations from a norm in the multi-dimensional face space. A preferential looking procedure was used to investigate the caricature effect in 6-9-month-olds. Infants’ visual preferences for their mother’s face were tested in comparison to the stranger’s face in three conditions: veridical depiction (0%), anti-caricature (-40%), and caricature (+40%). For the veridical depictions, 6- to 9-month-olds showed a significant visual preference for their mother’s face, whereas only 9-month-olds significantly preferred their mother’s face for the caricatures. 9-month-old infants partially showed the caricature effect in recognition of their mother’s face, with significantly higher preference for the mother’s face in the veridical depiction and the caricature than in the anti-caricature. When the face stimuli were inverted, infants showed no preference for the mother’s face in the all conditions. These results suggest that the ability to utilize exaggerated information to recognize familiar faces would develop at around 9 months of age.