[SEMINAIRE] Olivier Pascalis - Face Processing in Infancy and Beyond: The Case of Social Categories

Arriving in an unfamiliar world, infants need to quickly develop a core knowledge that allow them to organize the various multimodal items/stimuli present in their environment in order to predict and respond appropriately to those events. To achieve this, the infant will require the ability to categorize stimuli and relate this knowledge to previous experiences. Creating a memory representation for previously experienced events enables infants to develop more complex representations of stimuli that they repeatedly encounter and will help them to learn how to respond to other similar stimuli encountered in the future. Infants’ early categorization has been observed both in visual and auditory modalities: Human speech / animal sound, native/non-native language; male/female faces etc. (Quinn et al., 2019). The scientific literature indicates that young infants already possess categories (someone is human, from a specific gender or ethnic group). Current evidence suggests in fact that infants demonstrate early perceptual differences that may be associated with changes in how they represent other humans. I will present a series of studies on infant’s face categorization and on non human primates face categorization.