cues for early social skills direct gaze modulates newborns recognition of talking faces提示早期社交技能直接注视调节新生儿的识别的面孔.pdfVIP

Cues for Early Social Skills: Direct Gaze Modulates Newborns’ Recognition of Talking Faces Bahia Guellai*, Arlette Streri ´ ´ Rene Descartes University (Paris, France) Laboratory for Psychology of Perception, Unite Mixte de Recherche Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 8158, Centre ´ ` Biomedical des Saints-Peres, Paris, France Abstract Previous studies showed that, from birth, speech and eye gaze are two important cues in guiding early face processing and social cognition. These studies tested the role of each cue independently; however, infants normally perceive speech and eye gaze together. Using a familiarization-test procedure, we first familiarized newborn infants (n = 24) with videos of unfamiliar talking faces with either direct gaze or averted gaze. Newborns were then tested with photographs of the previously seen face and of a new one. The newborns looked longer at the face that previously talked to them, but only in the direct gaze condition. These results highlight the importance of both speech and eye gaze as socio-communicative cues by which infants identify others. They suggest that gaze and infant-directed speech, experienced together, are powerful cues for the development of early social skills. Citation: Guellai B, Streri A (2011) Cues for Early Social Skills: Direct Gaze Modulates Newborns’ Recognition of Talking Faces. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18610. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0018610 Editor: Manos Tsakiris, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom Received December 6, 2010; Accepted March 7, 2011; Published April 15, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Guellai and Streri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution,