A new study carried out on electroencephalograms of the brain responses of five-month-old babies has shown that they can individualize their mothers’ faces in fractions of a second.
The results indicate that babies can identify their mother’s face at a glance, from different angles and with different facial expressions, but only if it is not mixed with many other faces. The study was published in Cortex magazine of neurology.
Recognizing people by their faces is very important for social interactions. It is also a very complex task. However, despite their complexity, adult humans are often able to recognize the identities of thousands of faces. Also, they can do this extremely quickly, at a glance, in less than a second.
Previous studies have shown that people find it much easier to recognize familiar faces from different viewing angles and with different facial expressions than to select matching images that show unfamiliar faces. Every mother knows that her baby recognizes her in real life based on her smell, voice and appearance. But the researchers wondered if they could do this based on just one image.
The researchers recorded the brain responses of 39 five-month-old babies using electroencephalography (EEG). The authors chose babies of this age because previous studies showed that five-month-old babies could already recognize faces.
However, these studies showed babies’ faces longer. In this study, images of faces were presented to infants briefly but repeatedly. One of the faces in the group is called the target and is the face that the baby is expected to recognize, in this case the image of the mother.
The results showed that babies are able to identify their mother’s face even when looking at her with different angles and facial expressions, similar to older humans, and even with exposures as short as 170 ms (i.e. 1/6th of a second). , or the duration of a blink).
Babies, however, need to be introduced to their mother’s face frequently and not mixed with many different faces.
REFERENCE
Superior neural individualization of mother than faces of strangers at five months of age