de Heering Adélaïde, Turati Chiara, Rossion Bruno, Bulf Hermann, Goffaux Valérie, Simion Francesca
Département de Cognition et Développement et Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Cognition. 2008 Jan;106(1):444-54. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.012. Epub 2007 Jan 18.
A critical question in Cognitive Science concerns how knowledge of specific domains emerges during development. Here we examined how limitations of the visual system during the first days of life may shape subsequent development of face processing abilities. By manipulating the bands of spatial frequencies of face images, we investigated what is the nature of the visual information that newborn infants rely on to perform face recognition. Newborns were able to extract from a face the visual information lying from 0 to 1 cpd (Experiment 1), but only a narrower 0-0.5 cpd spatial frequency range was successful to accomplish face recognition (Experiment 2). These results provide the first empirical support of a low spatial frequency advantage in individual face recognition at birth and suggest that early in life low-level, non-specific perceptual constraints affect the development of the face processing system.
认知科学中的一个关键问题是特定领域的知识在发育过程中是如何出现的。在这里，我们研究了生命最初几天视觉系统的局限性如何影响面部处理能力的后续发展。通过操纵面部图像的空间频率带，我们研究了新生儿在进行人脸识别时所依赖的视觉信息的本质。新生儿能够从面部提取0至1周/度的视觉信息（实验1），但只有更窄的0至0.5周/度空间频率范围成功完成了人脸识别（实验2）。这些结果首次为出生时个体人脸识别中的低空间频率优势提供了实证支持，并表明在生命早期，低级、非特定的感知限制会影响面部处理系统的发展。
