Babies Learn to Save Face: Infants get prepped to perceive
By Bruce Bower
By the time babies are 6 months old, they distinguish the faces of different people—and can also discern the faces of specific monkeys. Now, researchers have found that with parental coaching, infants can retain their skill at telling animals apart instead of losing it by 9 months of age as babies usually do.
In their investigations of baby perception, psychologist Olivier Pascalis of the University of Sheffield in England and his team hypothesize that infants rapidly transform themselves from perceptual generalists to specialists (SN: 5/18/02, p. 307: Baby Facial: Infants monkey with face recognition). Intense practice at discerning different human faces prompts the loss of perceptual insights into nonhuman faces by 9 months of age, the scientists propose.