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Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation
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Face processing at birth: a Thatcher illusion study.

Irene Leo1, Francesca Simion

  • 1Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy. irene.leo@unipd.it

Developmental Science
|April 18, 2009
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Newborns can detect facial changes in upright images, showing early sensitivity to facial configuration. This ability is lost when faces are inverted, indicating a developmental preference for upright facial processing.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • Infants' face processing abilities are crucial for social development.
  • Understanding early face perception mechanisms informs developmental theories.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate newborns' ability to perceive configural changes in real face images.
  • To test newborn sensitivity to the Thatcher illusion, a test of configural processing.

Main Methods:

  • Habituation procedure used to assess discrimination.
  • Newborns habituated to upright or inverted faces.
  • Tested discrimination between unaltered and 'thatcheized' (inverted features) faces.

Main Results:

  • Newborns discriminated unaltered from thatcherized faces in upright orientation.
  • Newborns failed to discriminate the same stimuli when presented upside-down.
  • Results suggest sensitivity to second-order relational information in upright faces.

Conclusions:

  • Newborns possess an innate ability to process configural information in upright faces.
  • This sensitivity to spatial information is present from birth.
  • Face perception development shows an early bias towards upright orientation.