Infants’ responses to real humans and representations of humans

Abstract

Infants’ responses to typical and scrambled human body shapes were assessed in relation to the realism of the human body stimuli presented. In four separate experiments, infants were familiarized to typical human bodies and then shown a series of scrambled human bodies on the test. Looking behaviour was assessed in response to a range of different human body stimulus types including real people, mannequins, dolls and large human body photographs. Results were compared with previous experiments showing that when presented with small drawings, photographs or dolls, infants demonstrate knowledge about the whole human body shape only after their first birthday (Slaughter & Heron, 2004). In the current study, recognition of the typical human body shape was evident as early as 9 months of age when the stimuli were real humans, and infants’ responses to the various types of representations were linked to the realism of the portrayal. This pattern of findings indicates that even simple visual responses are not independent of the nature of the stimuli used to elicit them.