Poster #8 - Face Processing in Multimodal Contexts in 12-Month-Old Infants

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine the role of multimodal (i.e., audiovisual), synchronous and asynchronous stimulus exposure on 12-month-old infants’ attention to and processing of face stimuli. Previous research has indicated that synchronous, multimodal stimuli recruit infant attention and influence stimulus processing (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000). Furthermore, research on infant face processing has shown that by 12-months of age, infants demonstrate brain responses indicative of emerging face specialization (e.g., Conte et al., 2020). We carried out two experiments in this study. In Experiment 1, 67 12-month-olds were tested using an online platform called Lookit. In the first phase of the experiment, infants were familiarized with two videos presented simultaneously and side-by-side. Each video displayed a woman reciting a children’s story in an infant-directed manner. A soundtrack was played that matched one of the videos (experimental condition) or neither of the videos (control condition). It was hypothesized that synchronous audiovisual presentation would attract infants’ attention to that face and promote processing. Visual-paired comparison (VPC) trials were completed to measure looking preferences for the faces presented synchronously and asynchronously during familiarization and for novel faces. The results from one-sample t-tests showed that neither experimental nor control groups displayed a novelty preference during the VPC trials, all ps > .05. They also showed no significant correlations between looking times during the familiarization and VPC trials, all ps > .05. It is possible that the complexity of the familiarization stimuli made audiovisual synchrony more difficult to detect (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012). In Experiment 2, infants were familiarized with the video of only one woman to examine whether 12-month-old infants are able to process unimodal information within a single, multimodal face. This video was presented either synchronously or asynchronously with the soundtrack. Following familiarization, participants completed a VPC procedure identical to Experiment 1. Preliminary results from Experiment 2 have shown that infants displayed a novelty preference when the familiar face (M = 3.18 s) was paired with a novel face (M = 4.08 s), p < .05, despite familiarization with a synchronous or asynchronous familiarization stimuli. Taken together, the results from this study indicate that the competing face stimuli in the Experiment 1 familiarization were too complex for the visual, facial characteristics to be processed by 12-month-old infants. The manipulation completed in Experiment 2 (i.e., decreasing the number of faces in the familiarization procedure to one) led to increased processing of the face despite multimodal synchronous or asynchronous presentation. These results indicate that complexity of multimodal familiarization stimuli may play a greater role in the processing of unimodal visual properties than stimulus synchrony. This research contributes to our understanding of face processing in multimodal contexts, which have been understudied, although a great deal of naturalistic face exposure occurs multimodally.

Authors

• Aslı Bursalıoğlu, Loyola University Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Alexandra Michalak

• Eli Au Buchon

• Trinity Hope Bauer, Loyola University Chicago

• Olivia Hutchinson

• Maggie W Guy, Loyola University Chicago