Many faces, one rule: Abstract rule learning for face sequences in 7-month-old infants

Bulf, H. ¹ , Brenna, V. ¹ , Valenza, E. ² , Johnson, S. ³ & Turati, C. ¹

1 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca
2 Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Padova
3 Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles

Rule Learning (RL) is a mechanism that allows infants to recognize and generalize abstract rule-like patterns, such as ABB or ABA. Although some studies suggest that infants are better at learning rules from speech, other studies suggest that RL can be applied also to visual stimuli that infants can readily represent. Yet, RL has never been investigated using one of the most salient and frequent visual stimulus category available in infants' environment, i.e. faces. Here, we investigate 7-month-olds' ability to extract rule-like patterns from face sequences. Infants were habituated with face triads in an ABA condition (face A-face B-face A), or in an ABB condition. In the test phase, ABA and ABB triads, composed by faces that differed from those showed during habituation, were presented. When upright faces were used, infants were able to generalize the pattern presented during habituation to include the new face identities showed during testing (Experiment 1). When faces were presented in a non-familiar upside-down point of view, infants failed to extract the rule (Experiment 2), suggesting that the stimulus familiarity can modulate infants' RL abilities. This finding supports the idea that RL might be a domain-general mechanism, instead of a mechanism specific for language acquisition.