Newborns discriminate schematic faces from scrambled faces

Newborn attention to, and discrimination of, facelike patterns was examined in three experiments employing 35 one- to three-day-old infants. Differential eye tracking and head turning to three moving stimuli (a schematic face, a scrambled face, and a luminance-matched blank) were measured in two of the three experiments. The newborns turned their eyes and heads farther to follow patterned stimuli, containing facelike features, than to a luminance-matched blank, but they did not turn farther to a stimulus with the features arranged in a facelike manner compared to features scrambled. A third experiment tested newborns' ability to discriminate between the facelike and scrambled face patterns. Using an infant-controlled procedure, infants showed similar initial fixation times and similar numbers of trials to reach a 60% response decrement criterion to both patterned stimuli. Following habituation, novelty responding indicated that infants discriminated between the schematic face and the scrambled face patterns. Although infants did not show a preference for a facelike stimulus compared to a features-scrambled pattern in the present experiments, they could discriminate the two patterns based on the internal arrangement of the facial features.