Three-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces

Horizontal information is crucial to face processing in adults. Yet the ontogeny of this preferential type of processing remains unknown. To clarify this issue, we tested 3-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces. Specifically, infants were exposed to the simultaneous presentation of a face and a car presented in upright or inverted orientation while their looking behavior was recorded. Face and car images were either broadband (UNF) or filtered to only reveal horizontal (H), vertical (V) or this combined information (HV). As expected, infants looked longer at upright faces than at upright cars, but critically, only when horizontal information was preserved in the stimulus (UNF, HV, H). These results first indicate that horizontal information already drives upright face processing at 3 months of age. They also recall the importance, for infants, of some facial features, arranged in a top-heavy configuration, particularly revealed by this band of information. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 58: 536-542, 2016.