Neonates display reliable visual preferences for human faces and face-like stimuli, which has been taken as strong evidence for an innate domain-specific bias toward faces. Alternatively, neonatal face preference can be explained by an innate non-specific top-heavy configuration bias as faces are inherently top-heavy. My talk will contain three parts. In the first part, I will elaborate the top-heavy bias hypothesis and our recent follow-up studies. Using a forced-choice novelty preference method, we found that 2.5- to 4.5-mo-old infants showed significant and balanced novelty preferences, suggesting a reliable discriminability between the two configurations. Using an eye-tracker, we further examined if the top-heavy bias is still present in 3- to 5.5- mo-old infants and in adults as a comparison group, and found no evidence for the top-heavy bias in both infants and adults. The second part will focus on the development of the other-race effect. Recent studies have shown an early inception of the other-race effect that infants could discriminate own- and other-race faces at 3 months but lose sensitivity for other-race faces from 6 to 9 months; this is explained by the “perceptual narrowing” hypothesis. Using a set of more refined face discrimination tasks, we explored Taiwanese infant’s ability to process own- and other-race faces, and found that the youngest infants exhibited an own-race advantage and their face discrimination ability continued to improve; while their ability to discriminate other-race faces emerged later and maintained at basic level. The finding that infant’s discriminability for other-race faces did not disappear casts serious doubts on the perceptual narrowing hypothesis. In the last part, I will highlight my future directions in the next 5-8 years, which will focus on exploring the (life-long) development of the fifth core knowledge system with a multi-displinary approach.
To sum up, my position on early face and race processing is in line with the experience- expectant view; this view considers the brain specialization as emerging gradually from the interaction between small innate constraints and the critical input provided by the species-typical or race-typical environment. This interactive maturation process enriches infants’ capacities to recognize various faces and paves essential foundations for later cognitive and social development beyond infancy.