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Perception Of Mooney Faces By Young Infants: The Role Of Local Feature Visibility, Contrast Polarity And Motion, Yumiko Otsuka, Harold C. H Hill, So Kanazawa, Masami K. Yamaguchi, Branka Spehar

Harold Hill

We examined the ability of young infants (3- and 4-month-olds) to detect faces in the two-tone images often referred to as Mooney faces. In Experiment 1, this performance was examined in conditions of high and low visibility of local features and with either the presence or absence of the outer head contour. We found that regardless of the presence of the outer head contour, infants preferred upright over inverted two-tone face images only when local features were highly visible (Experiment 1a). We showed that this upright preference disappeared when the contrast polarity of twotone images was reversed (Experiment 1b), reflecting …