Now You See Me: Infants are Capable of Top-Down Perception of Own-Race Faces

Abstract

Perceptual narrowing is a developmental phenomenon that includes reduced discrimination for infrequently encountered stimuli and improved discrimination abilities for frequently encountered stimuli. Although perceptual narrowing has been extensively investigated across various domains, the mechanisms supporting perceptual narrowing are unknown. Hadley, Rost, and Fava (2014) propose a framework for perceptual narrowing that relies on the development of top-down processing to shape perception. However, to date, empirical work has not been able to demonstrate the direct effects of top-down processing on perception in young infants. This study aims to address this gap in research and examine whether top-down cueing can directly influence perception in infants. Ten to thirteen month-old infants were taught novel audio-visual associations between an auditory cue and faces, and then participated in a task that assessed whether their visual perception for faces improved when the auditory cue was present. The current experiment disentangled perception from other top-down processes, such as spatial attention, by adapting Gelskov and Koudier’s (2010) psychophysical face perception paradigm. The results show that young infants are able to use the auditory cue as a top-down cue to enhance their perceptual abilities. This is the first evidence that infants are capable of using top-down processing to directly influence perception. A follow-up experiment was conducted to begin establishing the relationship between top-down processing and perceptual narrowing. Findings show that infants are not able to apply top-down information to affect perception for a non-native category, namely, other-race faces. The differential findings for own-race and other-race faces lend support to Hadley et al.’s (2014) framework and suggest that the emergence of top-down perception may, in fact, play a role in the development of face perception and perceptual narrowing.