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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 16, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Experience-dependent neural specialization during infancy.

Lisa S Scott¹, Alexandra Monesson

¹Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. lscott@psych.umass.edu

Neuropsychologia

|February 16, 2010

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Infant face recognition develops through individual learning. Training infants to recognize specific monkey faces individually, not just as a category, fostered neural specialization for face processing.

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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

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Published on: July 1, 2015

Area of Science:

Developmental psychology
Neuroscience
Infant cognition

Background:

Infant face recognition abilities decline for other-race and other-species faces between 6-9 months.
This decline is linked to perceptual biases and lasting recognition deficits.
The impact of early infant experience on neural face processing structures is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how early infant experience shapes neural structures for face processing.
To determine if individual-level or category-level learning influences neural specialization in infants.

Main Methods:

Infants received 3 months of training with six monkey faces.
Training conditions included individual labeling, category labeling, or no labels.
Neural specialization for face processing was assessed.

Main Results:

Neural specialization for face processing was observed in infants trained with individually labeled monkey faces.
No neural specialization was found in infants trained with category-labeled faces or unlabeled faces.
These findings highlight the importance of individual identification in learning.

Conclusions:

Neural specialization for face processing in infancy is dependent on individual-level learning.
Learning to recognize individuals, rather than categories, is crucial for developing specialized neural representations.
This research provides insights into the mechanisms underlying early face perception development.