Seeing morphing faces of own- and other-race: the development of face discrimination in 3- to 7-year-old Taiwanese children

Abstract

Introduction. Previous studies on the other-race effect (ORE) in preschoolers and children mostly focused on recognition memory performance; however, the onset of ORE has been inconclusive across studies. Here we wish to explore the development of the ORE in 3- to 7-year-old Taiwanese children with a simultaneous morphing face discrimination task. Method. A set of morphed images of Caucasian and Asian male and female faces were used. In Experiment 1, 3- to 4-year-old children (N = 41) were tested with a forced-choice simultaneous pointing task. They viewed an Asian or Caucasian target parent face followed by a pair of comparison faces, with one being the "same parent" face and the other as a "different" morphed face (i.e., 30%, 60%, or 90% contribution from the other parent face). Children were asked to point out the same face with their fingers. In Experiment 2, 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 45) and adults (N=16) were tested with a forced-choice simultaneous matching task. The stimuli were the same as in Exp. 1, but the participants were asked to identify the face that was different from the target with keypress. Results. The results showed that, for all age groups, the accuracies of correctly pointing to the same or identifying the different face increased as the morph level increased, and the mean accuracies for the Asian- and Caucasian-parent conditions were about equal. Adults and 5- to 7-year-old children outperformed 3- and 4-year-old children at all morph levels; the performance of 7 year-olds at the three morph levels started to look adult-like. Conclusion. In sum, using the simultaneous morphing face pointing/matching task, the present study did not reveal an ORE in Taiwanese children aged between 3 and 7. However, a clear developmental progression in processing morphing faces was evident between young children and adults. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018