0000000000169858
AUTHOR
Mathieu Gallay
Le visage : l'objet visuel préféré du bébé
National audience
Qualitative differences in the exploration of upright and upside-down faces in four-month-old infants : An eye-movement study
The goal of this study was to test if apprentice readers (6-7 to 7-8 years old) and beginner readers (8-9 to 10-11 years old) perceive syllabic units in written words. The paradigm of illusory conjunctions was used because it can determine the infra-lexical units identified at the first steps of the written stimuli process. Two experiments were conducted on children from the first (6-7 years old) to the last years (10-11 years old) of the learning-to-read process. Results have shown that children perceive syllables in letter sequences as soon as the end of the first year of the learning-to-read process. The perception of these units is the result of two information sources: the syllabic pho…
Selective attention to facial identity and emotion in children
Three age groups of participants (6–8 years, 9–11 years, adults) performed two tasks: A face recognition task and a Garner task. In the face recognition task, the participants were presented with 20 faces and then had to recognize them among 20 new faces. In the Garner tasks, the participants had to sort, as fast as possible, the photographs of two persons expressing two emotions by taking into account only one of the two dimensions (identity or emotion). When the sorting task was on one dimension, the other dimension was varied either in a correlated, a constant or an orthogonal way in distinct subsessions. The results indicated an increase in face recognition abilities. They also showed a…
The Development of Perceptual Sensitivity to Second-Order Facial Relations in Children
This study investigated children's perceptual ability to process second-order facial relations. In total, 78 children in three age groups (7, 9, and 11 years) and 28 adults were asked to say whether the eyes were the same distance apart in two side-by-side faces. The two faces were similar on all points except the space between the eyes, which was either the same or different, with various degrees of difference. The results showed that the smallest eye spacing children were able to discriminate decreased with age. This ability was sensitive to face orientation (upright or upside-down), and this inversion effect increased with age. It is concluded here that, despite early sensitivity to conf…
The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information
International audience; The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by the top half of an upright or upside-down face that was or was not aligned with a bottom half that displayed another emotion. The results showed that the ability to recognize facial emotion develops with age, with a developmental course that depends on the emotion to be recognized. Moreover, children at all ages and adults e…