Children's Recognition of Unfamiliar Faces: Developments and Determinants

Abstract

Eight-to 12-year-old primary school children and 13-year-old secondary school children were given a live and a photographed face recognition task and several other figural tasks, all representing factors from Guilford's 'Structure of Intellect' model. While the scores on most tasks showed a more or less regular increase with age, the face recognition scores showed a different pattern. In the live face recognition task they did not change between ages 8 and 11, decreased at age 12 and returned to their former level at age 13. In the photographed face recognition task the scores did not change between 8 and 12 but significantly increased at age 13. There was no correlation between the recognition scores for live and photographed faces. The main conclusions drawn were: (1) between ages 8 and 11 there are, in face recognition tasks, no changes in the tendency to configurationally encode unfamiliar faces; (2) psychological concomitants of puberty onset are responsible for decreases in face recognition at age 12; (3) the transition to secondary school and the accompanying confrontation with many new faces has a positive effect on the capacity to recognize faces.