Infants' knowledge of their own species

Recognition of individuals at first sight is important for social species and can be achieved by attending to facial or body information. Previous research suggests that infants possess a perceptual template for evolutionarily relevant stimuli, which may include humans, dangerous animals (e.g. snakes), but not non-dangerous animals. To be effective, such a mechanism should result in a systematic preference for attending to humans over non-dangerous animals. Using a preferential looking paradigm, the present studies investigated the nature of infants' early representation of humans. We show that 3.5- and six-month-old infants attend more to human beings than non-human primates (a gorilla or monkey) which are examplars of non-dangerous animals. This occurred when infants were presented with head or body information in isolation, as well as when both are presented simultaneously. This early preference for humans by 3.5 months of age suggests that there is a basic representation for humans, which includes both head and/or body information. However, neonates demonstrated a preference only for human faces over non-human primate faces, not for humans over non-human primates when the stimuli were presented with both head and body simultaneously. The results show that although neonates display a preference for human faces over others, preference for the human body only develops later, in the first few months of life. This suggests that infants have acquired some knowledge about the human body at 3.5 months of age that may have developed from their privileged experience with other humans in the first few months of life, rather than an innate ability to detect humans in their entirety.