Alexis R. Colwell¹, Linda B. Smith¹; ¹Indiana University Bloomington

The perception of human faces is central to identifying people, communication, and reading emotions. Human infants show experience-dependent rapid developmental advances in all these abilities over the first year of life post birth. Advancing research suggests strong developmentally changing constraints on those experiences, with early experiences characterized by high frequency frontal views of faces that are close to the perceiver, with frequency and proximity decreasing with age and variability increasing. However, these findings have been shown for infants in one US town, and the observed developmental changes in face inputs could be specific to these infants and not infants more generally. We used head cameras to capture the faces in view for infants (n = 44,1 to 12 months) in a mid-size US town and a densely populated urban fishing village in India. Analyses of the 112,000 images indicated that US infants saw more faces overall compared to Indian infants, but Indian infants saw a greater number of unique faces. Despite this difference in number of unique faces, most faces infants saw in both countries belonged to the same few people. Despite these differences, similar developmental trends were observed: the frequency of faces and their proximity to the infant declined over the first year in both locations. Further, frontal views of faces dominated visual experiences in both locations. The results suggest similar developmental patterns in face experience during the first year of life in both locations despite marked differences in the visual environments.