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We examined the role of motion information on infants' recognition of unfamiliar faces. Previous studies suggested that motion information promotes infants' perception (Kellman & Spelke, 1983; Otsuka & Yamaguchi, 2003), and therefore we theorized that motion information should facilitate infants' face recognition. In the present study, we compared infants' recognition memory for unfamiliar faces learned in a moving or a static condition. Infants aged 3- to 5- months (N = 24) were first familiarized with a smiling woman face either in the moving or static condition. After familiarization, infants were tested using a pair of novel and familiar female faces. Both novel and familiar faces in the test phase had static, neutral expressions. Hair was excluded so that only the internal features were visible. We found that the infants in the moving condition showed a significant preference for novel faces, but that the infants in the static condition showed no preference for either of the faces. The present results suggest that learning from moving condition promotes infants' recognition of unfamiliar faces.

Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.