Perception of Facial Cues to Trustworthiness in Infancy: Insights from the Spatial Frequency Filtering Approach

A crucial aspect of human social competence is the ability to spontaneously and rapidly infer from facial cues whether others are likely to approach us with friendliness or hostility—that is, trustworthiness. The rapid and automatic nature of these inferences has prompted the claim that they may originate from evolutionary pressures to detect potential threats, thus enhancing our chances of survival. However, the developmental origins of this social skill remain a topic of ongoing debate. Recent evidence shows that infants' brains and looking time behaviors differentiate between faces varying along the trustworthiness continuum, but the question about the nature of the facial cues they rely on remains open. In this review, we propose the spatial frequency (SF) filtering approach (i.e., the selective removal of spatial frequency bands from the image) as a useful tool for investigating this question, and specifically whether infants' discrimination of facial expressions of emotion share common visual and neural mechanisms with discrimination of facial cues associated with trustworthiness inferences. The SF filtering approach could shed light on the neural and perceptual mechanisms underlying trustworthiness perception in infancy, providing insights into whether and how these mechanisms change across development. The evidence gathered through this method would prove critical to the understanding of the developmental origins of trustworthiness perception.