Department of Psychology, UCLA, United States.
Department of Psychology, California State University, Long Beach, United States.
Vision Res. 2021 Jul;184:1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2021.02.005. Epub 2021 Mar 23.
We examined development of 5- and 10.5-month-old infants' face representations, focusing on infants' discrimination and categorization of female and male faces. We tested for gender-based preferences and categorization of female and male faces by presenting infants with pairs of faces and then habituating them to a series of majority female or male face ensembles. We then tested for gender preferences with new face pairs (one female and one male; Study 1) or new face ensembles (majority female and majority male; Study 2). We found that both 5- and 10.5-month-old infants discriminated female from male faces in face pairs, and both age groups looked more at female faces during habituation. Neither age group, however, provided evidence of gender-based categorization. We interpret these findings within a theoretical framework that stresses environmental exposure to different social categories, and infants' ability to detect commonalities of features within categories. We conclude that infants' gender-based categorization of faces is constrained by the set of features available in the input.
我们研究了 5 个月和 10.5 个月大的婴儿的面部识别发展情况，重点关注婴儿对女性和男性面部的辨别和分类。我们通过呈现面部图像对婴儿进行测试，然后让他们适应一系列多数是女性或男性的面部组合，以此来测试他们是否存在基于性别的偏好和对女性和男性面部的分类。然后，我们用新的面部图像对（一个女性和一个男性；研究 1）或新的面部组合（多数是女性和多数是男性；研究 2）来测试他们的性别偏好。我们发现，5 个月和 10.5 个月大的婴儿都能在面部图像对中辨别女性和男性的面孔，而且两个年龄段的婴儿在适应过程中都更喜欢看女性的面孔。然而，两个年龄段的婴儿都没有提供基于性别的分类证据。我们根据一个强调婴儿接触不同社会类别的环境暴露以及婴儿识别类别内特征共性的能力的理论框架来解释这些发现。我们的结论是，婴儿对面部的基于性别的分类受到输入中可用特征集的限制。
