Distinct processing of objects and faces in the infant brain

& Previous work has shown that gamma-band electroencepha-logram oscillations recorded over the posterior cortex of infants play a role in maintaining object representations during occlu-sion. Although it is not yet known what kind of representations are reflected in these oscillations, behavioral data suggest that young infants maintain spatiotemporal (but not featural) infor-mation during the occlusion of graspable objects, and surface feature (but not spatiotemporal) information during the occlu-sion of faces. To further explore this question, we presented infants with an occlusion paradigm in which they would, on half of the trials, see surface feature violations of either a face or an object. Based on previous studies, we predicted higher gamma-band activation when infants were presented with a surface feature violation of a face, but not of an object. These results were confirmed. A further analysis revealed that whereas infants exhibited a significant increase in gamma during the occlusion of an object (as reported in previous studies), no such increase was evident during the occlusion of a face. These data suggest markedly different processing of objects and faces in the infant brain and, furthermore, indicate that the representation under-pinned by the posterior gamma increase may contain only spatio-temporal information. &amp