University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Darwin Muir
Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario
"Social Perception in Very Young Infants"
Presented on April 1, 2004
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- Abstract:
- The perception of social stimuli (people as opposed to objects) begins
early in life. Newborns discriminate faces from non-face patterns and by
3 months of age they readily engage in nonverbal communication with adults
during face-to-face interactions (reciprocal looking, smiling, frowning,
vocalizing). By introducing various alterations in the adult's behaviour
during both live interactions and interactions over TV we have shown that
infants are very sensitive to several aspects of adult social
communication. These include variations in adult contingency
(e.g., posing a still-face), facial expressions of emotion, facial
orientation, and eye direction, as well as alterations in the adult's
voice. In most cases infant sensitivity to these manipulations is indexed
by a drop in positive affect, while visual attention (the traditional
measure of infant perceptual function) remains constant. Finally, we
constructed a "virtual" adult on a TV monitor that talks and smiles at
infants in response to their social signals to achieve better stimulus
control and to alter aspects of the adult's face and voice that are
impossible to do live. Infants respond to our virtual adult as though she
is alive, and show similar reactions to the alterations in adult behaviour
described above. This technology may be useful to study individual
differences in social perception and reveal communication disorders
(e.g., autism spectrum disorder) in very young infants.
- About the Speaker:
- In our lab we are conducting studies in fetal-infant perception following a dynamic systems theory approach. The current focus is on the development of infant auditory localization response, the evaluation of fetal-infant sensitivity to vibroacoustic stimulation (including tactile stimulation by adults during adult-infant face-to-face interactions) and infant affect and attentional responses to changes in adult vocal and facial expressions of emotions during social interactions. Recent work includes: infant sensitivity to adult contingent stimulation and changes in eye-direction, as well as the use of eye-direction cues by infants and young children to evaluate their theory of mind. Also, we are studying the adults' ability to read facial and vocal emotional expressions and to detect eye-direction in upright and inverted faces.
