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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 26, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
05:35

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

Is the face-perception system human-specific at birth?

Elisa Di Giorgio1, Irene Leo, Olivier Pascalis

  • 1Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università degli Studi di Padova, via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy. elisa.digiorgio@unipd.it

Developmental Psychology
|December 7, 2011
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Newborns do not show a preference for human faces over monkey faces, indicating their early face perception is not limited to humans. This suggests a broader innate system for recognizing primate faces.

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Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: May 26, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
05:35

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

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Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
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Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues

Published on: June 3, 2013

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Comparative psychology

Background:

  • Neonates exhibit an innate preference for face-like stimuli.
  • The specificity of this early face-processing system remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the human-specificity of the neonatal orienting system for faces.
  • To determine if the face-perception system at birth includes nonhuman primate faces.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments were conducted with newborns.
  • Stimuli included human and monkey faces with matched perceptual properties.
  • Visual preference and discrimination abilities were assessed.

Main Results:

  • Newborns showed no spontaneous preference for human over monkey faces.
  • Newborns could discriminate between human and monkey faces.
  • Newborns preferred upright over inverted monkey faces, similar to human faces.

Conclusions:

  • The neonatal face-perception system appears to be tuned to primate faces broadly, not exclusively human faces.
  • Innate face preference mechanisms may bias attention towards socially relevant stimuli across species.
  • Findings support a generalized mechanism for processing salient primate facial features in early infancy.