ABSTRACT
Although faces are salient social stimuli and almost always occur in the context of people engaged in actions, there is little research on infants’ perception of faces in the context of dynamic activities. Previously, we (Bahrick, Gogate & Ruiz, 2002) demonstrated that 5-month-old infants were able to discriminate and remember a dynamic activity, but not the face of the individual performing the activity. Following familiarization with a particular woman engaged in a specific activity (e.g., brushing hair, brushing teeth, blowing bubbles), infants showed a preference for a novel activity but not a novel face, and they remembered the action but not the familiar face after a 7-week delay. Further, infants discriminated the faces only in static poses. Prior research has demonstrated exceptional face recognition skills by infants when tested with static displays. Why do 5-month-olds demonstrate such poor face recognition in dynamic activities? We tested an attentional salience explanation for infants’ discrimination of actions at the expense of faces. It was hypothesized that the reported failure of face discrimination did not reflect an inability to perceive faces in the context of dynamic events. Rather, it was a result of greater attentional selectivity to the action.
