Abstract
Although infants demonstrate sensitivity to some kinds of perceptual information in faces, many face capacities continue to develop throughout childhood. One debate is the degree to which children perceive faces analytically versus holistically and how these processes undergo developmental change. In the present study, school-aged children and adults performed a perceptual matching task with upright and inverted face and house pairs that varied in similarity of featural or 2nd order configural information. Holistic processing was operationalized as the degree of serial processing when discriminating faces and houses [i.e., increased reaction time (RT), as more features or spacing relations were shared between stimuli]. Analytical processing was operationalized as the degree of parallel processing (or no change in RT as a function of greater similarity of features or spatial relations). Adults showed the most evidence for holistic processing (most strongly for 2nd order faces) and holistic processing was weaker for inverted faces and houses. Younger children (6–8 years), in contrast, showed analytical processing across all experimental manipulations. Older children (9–11 years) showed an intermediate pattern with a trend toward holistic processing of 2nd order faces like adults, but parallel processing in other experimental conditions like younger children. These findings indicate that holistic face representations emerge around 10 years of age. In adults both 2nd order and featural information are incorporated into holistic representations, whereas older children only incorporate 2nd order information. Holistic processing was not evident in younger children. Hence, the development of holistic face representations relies on 2nd order processing initially then incorporates featural information by adulthood.
Highlights
A wealth of research suggests that face recognition and identification improve with age throughout childhood and adolescence (Goldstein and Chance, 1964; Ellis et al, 1973; Kagan and Klein, 1973; Carey and Diamond, 1977; Carey et al, 1980; Ellis and Flin, 1990; Pascalis and Slater, 2003; Gauthier and Nelson, 2001; de Heering et al, 2012)
The experiments manipulated many important factors that have been examined in prior studies of face development, including featural versus 2nd order processing, inversion and category, but the novel contribution was considering how these factors impact serial versus parallel processing which is a marker of the degree to which holistic processing is engaged
The similarity effect was linearly increasing only for “adults” 2nd order and featural upright face conditions. These findings suggest that older children show more adult-like processing of 2nd order information than featural information, with a holistic representation of faces that is more strongly linked to 2nd order information
Summary
A wealth of research suggests that face recognition and identification improve with age throughout childhood and adolescence (Goldstein and Chance, 1964; Ellis et al, 1973; Kagan and Klein, 1973; Carey and Diamond, 1977; Carey et al, 1980; Ellis and Flin, 1990; Pascalis and Slater, 2003; Gauthier and Nelson, 2001; de Heering et al, 2012). Diamond and Carey (1986) and Carey and Diamond (1994) suggested that perceptual expertise for faces is based on proficiently encoding and using 2nd order information. In their model, objects within a category are compared to a configural prototype in order to discriminate different exemplars. Faces are the only class of stimuli with which most adults have sufficient expertise to allow the use of 2nd order information (Carey and Diamond, 1994; Tanaka and Farah, 2003; Tarr and Cheng, 2003), the same processing may be used to support expertise with other visual categories (Diamond and Carey, 1986)
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