Study: Babies Better at Spotting Monkeys

ByABC News
May 15, 2002, 1:39 PM

May 17 -- Spotting a friend in a crowd can be difficult, but imagine trying to find one monkey in a stadium full of them.

A 6-month-old baby would do well at the task, say scientists.

New research suggests that infants are better at remembering and recognizing the faces of monkeys than older babies and adults are.

In a similar way that people zoom in on sounds of certain languages at young ages, we also fine-tune our brains to recognize certain kinds of faces as we age namely, human. In doing so, this study suggests, we eventually tune out the ability to recognize other kinds of faces.

The work carries implications in an ongoing debate over whether face recognition is an innate skill of genetic origin or one that is learned.

"This proves that it's a learned ability," argues Charles Nelson, a professor of child development, neuroscience and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the study appearing in this week's Science. "We know newborns have some genetic potential for face recognition, but this shows they develop it by experience."

Tuning In

To test face recognition, Olivier Pascalis of the University of Sheffield in England and Michelle de Haan of University College London showed adults and 6- and 9-month-old infants a series of two headshots of white men or women and two headshots of macaque monkeys. Included in each set of pictures was one face that the subject had seen before.

They discovered that the 6-month-olds easily distinguished between individual human faces and individual monkeys. This was evident in the way the babies gazed longer at the human and monkey faces that they had seen before. Babies only 3 months older and adults could also distinguish human faces, but found it nearly impossible to tell apart one monkey face from another.

"This is probably a reflection of the brain's 'tuning in' to the perceptual differences that are most important for telling human faces apart, and losing the ability to detect those differences that are not so useful," said de Haan in a release.