| Popis: |
Perceiving facial expressions is an essential ability for infants. Although previous studies indicated that infants could perceive emotion from expressive facial movements, the developmental change of this ability remains largely unknown. To exclusively examine infants’ processing of facial movements, we used point-light displays (PLDs) to present emotionally expressive facial movements. Specifically, we used a habituation and visual paired comparison (VPC) paradigm to investigate whether 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds could discriminate happy versus fear PLDs after being habituated with a happy PLD (happy-habituation condition) or a fear PLD (fear-habituation condition). Three-month-olds discriminated between the happy and fear PLDs in both the happy- and fear-habituation conditions. Six- and nine-month-olds showed discrimination only in the happy- but not the fear-habituation condition. These results indicated a developmental change in processing expressive facial movements. Younger infants tend to process low-level motion signals regardless of the depicted emotions, and older infants tend to process expressions, which emerges in familiar facial expressions (i.e., happy). Additional individual difference analysis and eye movement analysis supported this conclusion. In Experiment 2, we concluded that the findings of Experiment 1 were not due to a spontaneous preference for fear PLDs. Using inverted PLDs, Experiment 3 further suggested that 3-month-olds have already perceived PLDs as face-like stimuli. |
