Informatics Department, Indiana University.
Center for the Integrated Study of Animal Behavior, Indiana University.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Aug;45(8):e13021. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13021.
What role does experience play in the development of face recognition? A growing body of evidence indicates that newborn brains need slowly changing visual experiences to develop accurate visual recognition abilities. All of the work supporting this "slowness constraint" on visual development comes from studies testing basic-level object recognition. Here, we present the results of controlled-rearing experiments that provide evidence for a slowness constraint on the development of face recognition, a prototypical subordinate-level object recognition task. We found that (1) newborn chicks can rapidly develop view-invariant face recognition and (2) the development of this ability relies on experience with slowly moving faces. When chicks were reared with quickly moving faces, they built distorted face representations that largely lacked invariance to viewpoint changes, effectively "breaking" their face recognition abilities. These results provide causal evidence that slowly changing visual experiences play a critical role in the development of face recognition, akin to basic-level object recognition. Thus, face recognition is not a hardwired property of vision but is learned rapidly as the visual system adapts to the temporal structure of the animal's visual environment.
经验在人脸识别的发展中扮演什么角色？越来越多的证据表明，新生儿的大脑需要缓慢变化的视觉体验来发展准确的视觉识别能力。所有支持视觉发展“慢约束”的工作都来自于测试基本水平物体识别的研究。在这里，我们提出了受控饲养实验的结果，这些实验为人脸识别（一种典型的下属水平物体识别任务）的发展提供了慢约束的证据。我们发现：（1）新生小鸡可以快速发展出对不变的面孔的识别；（2）这种能力的发展依赖于对缓慢移动的面孔的经验。当小鸡被饲养在快速移动的面孔中时，它们建立的面孔表示很大程度上缺乏对视角变化的不变性，有效地“破坏”了它们的面孔识别能力。这些结果提供了因果证据，表明缓慢变化的视觉体验在人脸识别的发展中起着至关重要的作用，类似于基本水平的物体识别。因此，人脸识别不是视觉的固有特性，而是随着视觉系统适应动物视觉环境的时间结构而迅速学习的。
