Theories And Evidence On Face Recognition

The physical development of a baby in its first six months of life shows limited range of movement but the beginnings of an ability to respond to stimulus around them. They show their reaction to people, sounds and movement by turning their head toward whatever attracts their attention. They will watch an adult’s face whilst feeding, but have already begun to shows signs of recognition as they will smile when familiar people are around them either because they can see them

This double dissociation therefore suggests that recognition of faces and common objects is served by different mechanisms that are independent for each other. Although brain cells of face recognition have not been located, some functional models could help us interpret face recognition and prosopagnosia. One of the most influential models was proposed by Bruce and Young (1986). In this model face recognition involves several steps, and three steps more relate to prosopagnosia.

Cognitively, the way infants process information undergoes rapid changes during the infant’s first year. For instance, the Piagetian theory of cognitive development includes (1) the sensorimotor stage in which infants, through trial an error, build their understanding of things around the world (e.g. imitation of familiar behaviour); (p. 203, Chapter 6); (2) building schemas (e.g. a 5 month old child can move or drop an object fairly rigidly, whereas an older child can do the same action but with more intentional and creative movement);(p. 202, Chapter 6) and (3) the concept of object permanence (e.g. an infant knows that an object exists even though it is hidden encourages the child’s perceptual skills and awareness of the objects ‘realness’ in the world (p.

People try to understand the world through perception of experiences that they encounter. These encounters include either living through the experience first hand or the experience being conveyed by another person. Our perception weeds out main ideas from those experiences deeming them realistic and if so labels them truths. However, our perception of the obtained truth from those experiences is not always credible because as a recipient we are restricted to the amount of experience we can retain. Meaning the perceptions of the labeled truths is a result of our translation of incomplete experiences into new perception resulting from what he or she could retain from the original experience. Those incomplete experiences give rise to new

When the baby is about 3-6 months old they are able to recognise similar faces this could be of family such as parents, uncles, aunts, siblings or hospital staff for example doctor, nurse or midwife. They are also starting to develop wariness of strangers and parents for example in this situation they might start to cry whilst being picked up by their mums friend where as when they’re picked up by their mum they are absolutely fine it shows how attached the baby can be to their mother there is no one more important to them except their mummy and daddy. The face of the child will brighten up when a familiar carer turns up.

interpretations it is stated that what we view within our minds are just rifts between reality and

Saxe identifies this group as preverbal babies. By studying the behaviors of these infants, psychologists are able determine that basic instinct that humans share. These babies, aged between four and twelve months, are much too young to be influenced by the institution around them. The infants are also too young to communicate their thought processes, so psychologists analyze the only responses these infants can communicate, looking and crawling. In the experiment involving these preverbal infants, babies were shown videos of one man being “nice” to a girl while another was “mean” to the girl.

How do we know infants can see at birth? They can’t tell us. For this we depend on clues such as eye movement, light sensitivity and the appearance of the eye. Though an infant 's vision is present at birth the strength of their vision is far from mature. However, vision develops rapidly in infants, going from only being able to focus on images 4 to 30 inches away to a rapid ability to see details and shape (Berger, 2014). By 3 months these same infants with immature ability can see patterns color and motion. Surveys and medical research are regularly used to develop a better understanding of infant development.

In both articles, infants’ gazes are crucial to the experiments conducted. Whether reacting to disappearing objects in Baillargeon's article or identifying with someone of the same skin color as said in Spelke and Kinzler’s article.

Therefore, beforing delving into the literature on attachment, one must examine the role of the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere undergoes major developmental changes within the first two years of life when infants begin to recognize the importance of faces in their lives and to regulate their emotional attachments for those people. For instance, with evidence from neuroscientists, they have documented that visual input to the right (and not left) hemisphere during infancy is essential for the development of the capacity to efficiently process information from faces (Schore and Schore, 2008). Thus, making the right hemisphere a critical part in the development of

Prosopagnosia is a condition where a person cannot recognise familiar faces, but only the features, not the whole face. The condition contradicts the model as it suggests that the process are most likely not separate. As most patients had severe problems with facial expression as well as facial identity, this suggests they are processed separately. The model can also be seen as reductionist, as it only gives a vague description of what the cognitive system does. However, there is research that does support the concept that there are two are separate paths for processing face recognition and facial expression. One being Humphreys, Avidan, and Behrmann (2007) who studied three participants with developmental prosopagnosia. All three had poor ability to recognise faces, but their ability to recognise facial expressions was similar to that of healthy

This stage lasts from birth to twelve months. In this stage, infants gain knowledge about their surrounding by using their senses. (Clarke-Stewart, Gruber, & Fitzgerald, 2007, p. 154). They recognize the faces of their caregivers and may respond to smiles. At these stage infants are generally attracted to bright colors, and show response to sound by turning towards the direction of the sound. Studies have indicated that infants between the ages of three and seven weeks have the ability to recognize shapes and pictures of human faces (Goswami, 1994, p. 376).

This essay will talk about face recognition and several reasons why it has been studied separately. The ability to recognise faces is of huge significance of people’s daily life and differs in important ways from other forms of object recognition (Bruce and Young, 1986). Than this essay will talk about the processes involved in face recognition which comes from the diversity of research about familiar and unfamiliar faces-it includes behavioural studies, studies on brain-damaged patients, and neuroimaging studies. Finally, it will discuss how face recognition differs from the recognition of other object by involving more holistic or configuration processing and different areas of the brain (Eysenck & Keane, 2005).

New born infants have poor visual acuity as opposed to adults. Visual acuity measures to what extent an individual can detect visual detail. Their lack of visual acuity means they see the world a more ill-defined manner. Adult visual acuity is thirty times the visual acuity of a new born (Van Hof-van Duin & Mohn 1985). Atkinson & Bradrick (1981), supported this and found that new born infants could only detect the separation of lines if they are 30 times wider than the minimum width adults can detect. There is at least a five-fold improvement by 6 months of age in acuity, though it takes several years for it to reach adult level, Brown & Yamamoto 1986. New born infants also have poor visual accommodation, needed to make sharp retinal images at different distances.

Their theory has enough empirical evidence although it lacks the initial face detection stage and can be said to be inflexible, with limited case study size resulting in the findings having the possibility of lacking generalizability.