Social avoidance motivation tendency linked to face processing ability among 6- to 12-year-old children

Abstract

This study examined whether social motivation was associated with face recognition ability and holistic face processing strategy among typically developing children. One hundred and three 6- to 12-year-old children were instructed to complete the approach and avoidance task, which was adopted to measure social motivation tendency, as well as the recognition of face identity task and the part-whole task, which were used to assess children’s face recognition ability and holistic processing strategy, respectively. For social motivation, the result revealed that 6- to 7-year-old children showed a lower social approach tendency, whereas 8- to 11-year-old children did not show preferences for social pictures over nonsocial pictures. While a linear improvement in face recognition abilities was found from 6- to 11-year-old children, a plateau emerged in face recognition performance from age 10 to 11. In contrast to face holistic processing strategy, 10- to 11-year-old children tend to use a featural processing strategy for identifying facial features. Although the relationship between social motivation and face recognition was not moderated by children’s age, results revealed that high social avoidance tendency toward emotionally neutral and negative pictures significantly predicted faster face recognition after controlling for IQ of children, and high social avoidance tendency to neutral pictures significantly predicted faster eye identification. However, social motivation was not associated with holistic face processing. These findings highlight the importance of social motivation in the development of children’s face recognition abilities.