Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The present study looks at whether 4-month-old infants explore upright and upside-down faces in the same way. Infants were habituated with an upright or an upside-down face. Eye movements were recorded during all the habituation. The eye-movement recordings showed that the upright and upside-down faces were not explored in the same way. Infants spent more time exploring internal features, mainly in the region of the nose and mouth, when the face was upright. They also alternated as frequently between the face’s internal features (eyes vs. nose/mouth) as between external and internal features. When the face was upside-down, the infants spent half of their time exploring external features, and preferentially alternated between external features and internal features. The main effect of inversion was a decrease of the looking time to the nose/mouth region and of the number of shifts between the eye region and the nose/mouth region.