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Face processing at birth: a Thatcher illusion study
Author(s) -
Leo Irene,
Simion Francesca
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00791.x
Subject(s) - psychology , habituation , illusion , orientation (vector space) , face (sociological concept) , face perception , cognitive psychology , visual perception , information processing , developmental psychology , audiology , perception , neuroscience , medicine , social science , geometry , mathematics , sociology
The present study was aimed at exploring newborns’ ability to recognize configural changes within real face images by testing newborns’ sensitivity to the Thatcher illusion. Using the habituation procedure, newborns’ ability to discriminate between an unaltered face image and the same face with the eyes and the mouth 180° rotated (i.e. thatcherized) was investigated. Newborns were able to discriminate an unaltered from the thatcherized version of the same face when stimuli were presented in the canonical upright orientation (Experiment 1), but failed to discriminate the same stimuli when they were presented upside‐down (Experiment 2). The results indicate that sensitivity to fine spatial information (defined as second‐order relational information) in processing upright faces is already present at birth .