Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Past research demonstrated that newborns looked longer at live faces and two-dimensional still images of the mother than at the faces and images of strangers (Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin, 1989; Field, Cohen, Garcia, & Greenberg, 1985; Walton, Bower, & Bower, 1992). This study examined schema (prototype) theory as a basis for newborn's preference for the mother's face by creating composite (prototype) faces with a pixel averaging technique. Results obtained with a preferential operant-sucking procedure indicated that formation of a representation of faces was rapid. Newborns preferred to look at a composite of presented faces rather than a composite of unseen faces on the first-look presentation of each. The effect faded over the duration of the experiment.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Amiel-Tison

Grenier

(1986). Neurological assessment during the first year of life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bushnell

I.W.R.

Sai

Mullin

J.T.

(1989). Neonatal recognition of the mother's face. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7, 3–15.

Crook

C.K.

(1979). The organization and control of infant sucking. In Lipsitt

L.P.

Spiker

C.C.

, (Eds.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 14, pp. 209–252). New York: Academic Press.

Field

T.M.

Cohen

Garcia

Greenberg

(1985). Mother-stranger face discrimination by the newborn. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 19–25.

Hochberg

J.E.

(1962). Nativism and empiricism in perception. In Postman

, (Ed.), Psychology in the making (pp. 255–330). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Kagan

(1985). The nature of the child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Langlois

J.H.

Roggman

L.A.

(1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1, 115–121.

Lewis

Kagan

Kalafat

(1966). Patterns of fixation in the young infant. Child Development, 37, 331–341.

Meltzoff

A.N.

Moore

K.M.

(1989). Imitation in newborn infants: Exploring the range of gestures imitated and the underlying mechanisms. Developmental Psychology, 25, 954–962.

10.

Norman

D.A.

(1986). Reflections on cognition and parallel distributed processing. In Rumel-hart

D.E.

McClelland

J.L.

, & the PDF Research Group, (Eds.) Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (Vol. 2, pp. 531–546). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

11.

Strauss

M.S.

(1979). Abstraction of prototypical information by adults and 10 month old infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 618–632.

12.

Walton

G.E.

Bower

N.J.A.

Bower

T.G.R.

(1992). Recognition of familiar faces by new-borns. Infant Behavior and Development, 15, 265–269.

13.

Wertheimer

(1961). Psycho-motor coordination of auditory-visual space at birth. Science, 134, 1962.

Newborns Form “Prototypes” in Less Than 1 Minute

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References