Categorical perception of facial expressions by 7-month-old infants

Recent research indicates that adults show categorical perception of facial expressions of emotion. It is not known whether this is a basic characteri stic of perception that is present from the earliest weeks of life, or whet her it is one that emerges more gradually with experience in perceiving and interpreting expressions. We report two experiments designed to investigat e whether young infants, like adults, show categorical perception of facial expressions. 7-month-old infants were shown photographic quality continua of interpolated (morphed) facial expressions derived from two prototypes of fear and happiness. In the first experiment, we used a visual-preference t echnique to identify the infants' category boundary between happiness and f ear. In the second experiment, we used a combined familiarisation-visual-pr eference technique to compare infants' discrimination of pairs of expressio ns that were equally physically different but that did or did not cross the emotion-category boundary. The results suggest that 7-month-old infants (i ) show evidence of categorical perception of facial expressions of emotion, and (ii) show persistent interest in looking at fearful expressions.