Face recognition in infants: A review of behavioral and near-infrared spectroscopic studies

Abstract

Recent developmental studies investigating face recognition ability in infants' have provided evidence not only that infants show selective attention to faces, but also that they can discriminate between faces from birth, and that biases in face processing such as the face inversion and other race effects exist even in infancy. Studies measuring the hemodynamic responses to facial images in the infants' brain using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) have also reported differential cortical activity in response to face and nonface images in infants. This paper will review recent findings on infants face recognition provided by both behavioral studies and neuroimaging studies using NIRS. These converging lines of evidence point to the early onset of face recognition ability in infancy. © 2013 Japanese Psychological Association.