人文科学研究所公開研究会開催のお知らせ（「視覚と認知の発達」チーム）

講　 師：    Viola Macchi Cassia 氏 (ミラノ・ビコッカ大学教授)

テーマ ：    Early sensitivity to facial cues to trustworthiness

要　 旨：  

Sensitivity to social cues of trustworthiness - i.e., those facial configurations we use to

establish whether a stranger is approaching us safely or hostilely – is a crucial and

adaptive social skill. Although much research has been done on delineating the behavioural

and neural mechanisms subtending adults’ sensitivity to facial cues of trustworthiness,

how this ability develops in time has been underinvestigated. Evidence from children

suggest that 3-year-olds are able to judge how ‘mean’ or ‘nice’ a person is, and by the age

of 6 these judgements acquire the same level of consistency as those provided by the adults

(Cogsdill,Todorov, Spelke, & Banaji, 2014). More recently, studies with preverbal infants

have found evidence of sensitivity to facial cues to trustworthiness at 6 months,when infants

showed neural discrimination between neutral faces and faces that layat the extreme

opposites of the trustworthiness continuum (i.e., very trustworthy and very untrustworthy)

(Jessen & Grossmann, 2016, 2017, 2019), and a behavioral preference towards very

trustworthy faces with respect to neutral and very untrustworthy ones (Jessen &

Grossmann, 2016; Sakuta, Kanazawa, & Yamaguchi, 2018).However, all the existing

developmental studies used computer-generated male faces as stimulus material,

which raises important issues of ecological validity, leading to underestimation, or

possibly even underestimation, of infants’ sensitivity to facial cues to trustworthiness. To

overcome this limitation, we measured infants’ behavioral and electrophysiological

responses to very trustworthy, very untrustworthy and neutral faces using real face images

taken from a previously validated trustworthiness continuum created by manipulating

parametrically two averaged female face identities.

Overall, our results confirm previous demonstrations of early tuning to those facial cues that

adults use to generate trustworthiness judgements, and show that neural sensitivity to

these cues are modulated by individual differences in temperamental traits.

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主催：中央大学人文科学研究所「視覚と認知の発達」チーム

共催：科学研究費助成事業 新学術領域研究（研究領域型提案）

　　　「トランスカルチャー状況下における顔身体学の構築 ―多文化をつなぐ顔と身体表現」