Facial Emotion and Identity Processing Development in 5- to 15-Year-Old Children

Alicia Sercombe,Jordy Kaufman,Patrick J Johnston,Patricia T Michie,Julie Bajic,Frini Karayanidis

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00026

Abstract

Most developmental studies of emotional face processing to date have focused on infants and very young children. Additionally, studies that examine emotional face processing in older children do not distinguish development in emotion and identity face processing from more generic age-related cognitive improvement. In this study, we developed a paradigm that measures processing of facial expression in comparison to facial identity and complex visual stimuli. The three matching tasks were developed (i.e., facial emotion matching, facial identity matching, and butterfly wing matching) to include stimuli of similar level of discriminability and to be equated for task difficulty in earlier samples of young adults. Ninety-two children aged 5–15 years and a new group of 24 young adults completed these three matching tasks. Young children were highly adept at the butterfly wing task relative to their performance on both face-related tasks. More importantly, in older children, development of facial emotion discrimination ability lagged behind that of facial identity discrimination.

Highlights

Does the manner in which faces are perceived and processed develop significantly through childhood? This is a fundamental question for developmental psychologists, neuroscientists as well as parents, and educators
The current study aims to assess the development of facial identity and facial emotion processing across a broad age range of children and adolescents (6- to 15-years old) using tasks that are equated for discrimination difficulty in adults
The primary purpose of this work was to explore the differential development of face processing skills in middle-to-late childhood

Summary

Introduction

Does the manner in which faces are perceived and processed develop significantly through childhood? This is a fundamental question for developmental psychologists, neuroscientists as well as parents, and educators. While there is a certain level of mystery that will always surround how young infants see the faces of people around them, it is tempting to assume that older children see faces as adults do, since they clearly recognize their parents, siblings, teachers, and so on. It is clear from research conducted over the past two decades that there is a great deal of development in how children recognize both identity and emotional expressions in the faces around them. This work represents our efforts to further clarify children’s face processing through the minimization of these confounds

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