Facial dominance augments perceived proximity: Evidence from a visual illusion.

Dominance is a major organizing principle of human societies that impacts a wide range of human behaviors, from gaze-following to voting choices. Here, we examined how dominance modulates a fundamental perceptual ability: the perception of proximity. We used the "Fat Face" illusion, a novel paradigm that measures perceived proximity implicitly.

The effect of masks on the visual preference for faces in the first year of life.

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess how face masks modulate infants' attention to faces over the course of the first year of life.

Infant sensitivity to age-based social categories in full-body displays.

This study examined 3.5- and 6-month-old infants' visual preferences for individuals from different age groups: adults versus infants. Unlike previous studies that only studied faces, here we included bodies, which are as frequent as faces in our environment, and highly salient, and in consequence, may play a role in identifying social categories and driving social preferences.

The "Fat Face" illusion: A robust adaptation for processing pairs of faces.

Converging evidence has demonstrated our remarkable capacities to process individual faces. However, in real-life contexts, we rarely see faces in isolation. It is largely unknown how our visual system processes a multitude of faces.