The Effect of Unique Labels on Face Perception in Infancy

Hadley, Hillary R

Publication:
The Effect of Unique Labels on Face Perception in Infancy

dc.contributor.advisor	Lisa S. Scott
dc.contributor.author	Hadley, Hillary R
dc.contributor.department	University of Massachusetts Amherst
dc.date	2023-09-23 15:20:53
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-26T16:17:01Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-26T16:17:01Z
dc.date.submitted	September
dc.date.submitted	2016
dc.description.abstract	Faces are universally important for a variety of reasons, ranging from identifying individuals to conveying social information. During the first year of life, infants‚Äô experience with commonly encountered face groups shapes how infants perceive familiar and unfamiliar faces. Between 6 and 9 months of age, infants become worse at differentiating among individual faces from unfamiliar face groups (e.g., other-species faces), a process known as ‚Äúperceptual narrowing‚Äù. Labeling faces from a previously unfamiliar face group has been found to promote individual-level differentiation, as well as expert neural processing for the face group. However, it is currently unclear what influences individual-level labels have on face perception at the neural level during the label learning process. The current study investigated effects of individual labels on neural responses to a previously unfamiliar face group by providing in-lab training experience and recording two types of neural responses ‚Äì event-related potentials and steady state visual evoked potentials ‚Äì during and immediately after label-face learning. Results indicate that 6- and 9-month-old infants use labels to learn about unfamiliar faces in different ways, such that labels impact face processing earlier in the learning period and across more stages of processing in older versus younger infants. Additionally, at 9 months, infants still differentiate among exemplars within an unfamiliar face group, and brief individuating experience localizes processing over face-related brain regions. The results of this study contribute to our understanding of what infants gain from a single labeling experience and how neural responses related to face processing change with learning and across the first year of life.
dc.description.degree	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.description.department	Psychology
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.7275/8797543.0
dc.identifier.orcid	N/A
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/20096
dc.relation.url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1771&context=dissertations_2&unstamped=1
dc.source.status	published
dc.subject	perceptual narrowing
dc.subject	event-related potentials
dc.subject	steady state visual evoked potentials
dc.subject	Developmental Psychology
dc.title	The Effect of Unique Labels on Face Perception in Infancy
dc.type	openaccess
dc.type	dissertation
digcom.contributor.author	isAuthorOfPublication\|email:hhadley@psych.umass.edu\|institution:University of Massachusetts Amherst\|Hadley, Hillary R
digcom.identifier	dissertations_2/839
digcom.identifier.contextkey	8797543
digcom.identifier.submissionpath	dissertations_2/839
dspace.entity.type	Publication