Infants’ experience-dependent processing of male and female faces: Insights from eye tracking and event-related potentials

• We use two methods: event-related potentials and eye tracking, to examine face processing in 7-month old infants.
• Our specific focus concerns the impact of extensive visual experience on perceiving face gender and recognizing faces.
• We found that female faces elicited a larger N290 (a face sensitive ERP component) than did male faces.
• The N290 was more negative for novel female faces than primed female faces but no differences were found between male faces.
• Behaviorally infants showed evidence of discriminating both male and female faces.

The goal of the present study was to investigate infants’ processing of female and male faces. We used an event-related potential (ERP) priming task, as well as a visual-paired comparison (VPC) eye tracking task to explore how 7-month-old “female expert” infants differed in their responses to faces of different genders. Female faces elicited larger N290 amplitudes than male faces. Furthermore, infants showed a priming effect for female faces only, whereby the N290 was significantly more negative for novel females compared to primed female faces. The VPC experiment was designed to test whether infants could reliably discriminate between two female and two male faces. Analyses showed that infants were able to differentiate faces of both genders.The results of the present study suggest that 7-month olds with a large amount of female face experience show a processing advantage for forming a neural representation of female faces, compared to male faces. However, the enhanced neural sensitivity to the repetition of female faces is not due to the infants’ inability to discriminate male faces. Instead, the combination of results from the two tasks suggests that the differential processing for female faces may be a signature of expert-level processing.