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Updated: May 27, 2025

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
Published on: May 15, 2019
The development of Mooney face perception in 6- to 11-month-old infants
Nanako Yamanaka1, Yumiko Otsuka2, Masaharu Kato3
1Department of Psychology, Rikkyo University, Saitama 352-8558, Japan; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo 102-0083, Japan.
Abstract:
Mooney faces are two-tone facial images with degraded individual features (e.g., eyes and mouth) and retain only shadows and highlights. Previous research has reported that even young infants can detect faces from Mooney face images despite the degraded features. In Experiment 1, we tested the upright preference for Mooney face images with the features degraded at four levels, from Level 1 (slightly degraded) to Level 4 (extremely degraded). The results indicated that infants showed a significant visual preference for upright images over inverted images under the Level 1 (slightly degraded) and Level 2 (moderately degraded) conditions. In addition, in Experiment 2 we confirmed that infants showed an upright face preference for the original non-degraded face images. The results of the two experiments suggest that although infants aged 6 to 11 months consistently showed an upright face preference even for Mooney face images with relatively modest degradedness, their ability to detect face figures from Mooney face figures was still immature.
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