Institute of Child Development

Child Brain and Perception Lab

How Do Babies Tell Faces Apart?

Research Highlights: How Do Babies Tell Faces Apart?

  • On average, 11- to 26-month-old toddlers searched for a longer period of time inside of the box when they were shown two faces, but could only find one hidden face. This supports our initial hypothesis.  
  • Surprisingly, we found a lot of individual variability, meaning not every child performed the same way! Some children reached for only half a second and others reached for over 10 seconds. We are now exploring this finding in a new study. Stay tuned!
  • Our findings, now published in a scientific journal called Infancy, tell us that by 11 months, toddlers are able to focus on facial identity and skin color when tasked with keeping track of how many people are present.

Read More About This Study

Between 2022 and 2023, 100 children ages 11 to 26 months participated in a study that examined which facial features toddlers use when counting the number of people presented to them. The study involved a hide-and-seek type game where we hid either one or two faces inside of a black box. We wanted to know if toddlers represented faces of different identity and skin color as being from the same or different group. We recorded how long and how often toddlers reached inside the box after seeing either one or two faces hidden within the box. Our hypothesis (prediction) was that toddlers would reach more when they saw two faces go inside of the box compared to only seeing one face go inside of the box. Our goal was to better understand the way toddlers group different types of facial features together.

Toddler wearing yellow shirt sits on parent's lap and reaches toward a box across the table with a face on top of it.