Baby

Nina Typusiak has no doubt her seven-month-old daughter, Grace, recognizes her. “It’s sheer excitement when she sees me,” she says. “It’s like, yes, you’re my whole world.” If someone else is holding her, and Typusiak walks into the room, Grace will turn towards her, smile and “kind of shake, like a little body convulsion.”

Typusiak’s right, says Daphne Maurer, psychology professor and researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton. Recognizing faces is such an important human skill that babies start learning how to do it from birth.

Maurer studied babies just minutes after birth and found they already prefer looking at designs that resemble faces. And by just a few days old, babies will look longer at their own mother’s face than at those of strangers.

However, Maurer adds, at that early stage they can be easily confused. If both the mother and the stranger are wearing identical kerchiefs, for example, the baby will have trouble telling them apart. “Babies look at the external contours — the hair, the shape of the chin,” Maurer explains. “It looks like babies initially recognize their mother’s hairdo more than anything else.”

By two or three months of age, though, babies begin to look more at the internal features of the face — the nose, mouth and especially the eyes. These are the same features adults tend to use in deciding whether a face is familiar or not. By three months, babies can recognize their own mother even when her hair is covered or changed. They can also recognize a face from various points of view and know it’s still the same person.

“This is real face recognition,” Maurer says. “As adults, we can meet up with someone we haven’t seen for 10 years, and they’ve aged, changed their hair, gained weight — yet we still recognize them. We know they’re familiar, even if we can’t put a name to the face right away. By three months, babies are beginning the process that leads to being able to do that.”

Because humans are social creatures, the ability to identify faces and the subtle emotions shown in facial expressions is critical. Maurer points out that this skill is the slowest-developing of all visual systems. “It takes until adolescence for children to become as good as adults at recognizing faces,” she says. “Even a 14-year-old will make more mistakes than an adult.”

Part of it is simply practice. The more a baby sees faces, especially those of his parents, the more he learns about what makes each one unique. Fortunately, Maurer notes, most parents enjoy giving their babies plenty of opportunities to look at them — because they enjoy looking at their baby at the same time! But babies whose vision is impaired (such as the very rare situation of infants born with cataracts) in these early months miss out on this important experience, and research shows they never fully develop the normal face recognition skills that other children do.

“The architecture of the brain is being created in those early weeks, and it sets up the brain for the next 18 years of development in visual skills,” says Maurer. A baby’s memory for faces also doesn’t last very long. At three months, your baby can keep your face in his memory for about 24 hours.

At first it may be hard to tell if your baby recognizes you as an individual. Young babies will smile at a stranger as easily as they smile at their parents. But by around three months or so, most will demonstrate their recognition by interacting somewhat differently. “It’s like a dance between the mother and baby,” Maurer says. “The mother does something and waits, and the baby responds, and waits for the mother to react. They are in sync in a way that a baby won’t be with a stranger.”

By the second half of the first year, most babies will respond negatively to strangers and show clear signs of wanting to be with their parents. By then, you won’t need to ask the question. Like Nina Typusiak, you will know without a doubt that your baby recognizes you — and thinks yours is the most beautiful face in the world.

Originally published in Today's Parent, November 2004