Abstract
One way in which face recognition develops during infancy and childhood is with regard to the visual information that contributes most to recognition judgments. Adult face recognition depends on critical features spanning a hierarchy of complexity, including low-level, intermediate, and high-level visual information. To date, the development of adult-like information biases for face recognition has focused on low-level features, which are computationally well-defined but low in complexity, and high-level features, which are high in complexity, but not defined precisely. To complement this existing literature, we examined the development of children’s neural responses to intermediate-level face features characterized using mutual information. Specifically, we examined children’s and adults’ sensitivity to varying levels of category diagnosticity at the P100 and N170 components. We found that during middle childhood, sensitivity to mutual information shifts from early components to later ones, which may indicate a critical restructuring of face recognition mechanisms that takes place over several years. This approach provides a useful bridge between the study of low- and high-level visual features for face recognition and suggests many intriguing questions for further investigation.
Highlights
An important way to understand how face recognition develops is to characterize the information used by the developing visual system to categorize faces or non-faces
We examined both the P100 event-related potentials (ERPs) component and the N170 component subject to variation in
We examined both the P100 ERP component and the N170 component subject to variation in the the image category, mutual information (MI) level and age group
Summary
An important way to understand how face recognition develops is to characterize the information used by the developing visual system to categorize faces or non-faces. There have been many developmental studies (including both behavioral and neural responses) examining how adults’ and children’s face recognition is affected by the presence of specific low-level features (spatial frequency or orientation sub-bands), and the availability of higher-level visual information (configural or holistic face appearance). Mid-level face features occupy a useful middle ground between low- and high-level descriptors of face structure and allow for a balance between feature complexity and our ability to objectively quantify the information carried by features under consideration. We elaborate on these points below by briefly describing
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