Abstract
Holistic face perception is often considered to be a cornerstone of face processing. However, the development of the ability to holistically perceive faces in East Asian individuals is unclear. Therefore, we measured and compared holistic face processing in groups of Chinese children, young adults, and older adults by employing the complete composite face paradigm. The results demonstrate a similar magnitude of the composite effect in all three groups although face recognition performance in the task was better in young adults than in the two other groups. These findings suggest that holistic face perception in Eastern individuals is stable from late childhood to at least age 60, whereas face memory may be subject to later development and earlier decline.
Highlights
Humans are visual experts in face perception (Richler and Gauthier, 2014)
One young adult was excluded from further analysis due to their accuracy being less than chance level (0.5), and one child was excluded because his average response time was outside the three standard deviations of the same group
The descriptive results of mean sensitivities (A′) and response times are shown in Figures 2, 3
Summary
Humans are visual experts in face perception (Richler and Gauthier, 2014). A key characteristic of face perception is its holistic nature (Gauthier et al, 2003; Richler and Gauthier, 2014), that is, processing the face as a whole rather than in a piecemeal and feature-based fashion. Recent studies explored the characteristics of holistic face processing across the lifespan (Cheng et al, 2016; Meinhardt-Injac et al, 2017) and demonstrated that the holistic face processing ability is stable from 11 years of age to adulthood (De Heering et al, 2007; Ventura et al, 2018; Sun et al, 2020). Based on previous evidence that face recognition and attention-related abilities of older adults aged 56–65 years and young adults are similar (Crook and Larrabee, 1992; Greenwood and Parasuraman, 1994), any age-effects in holistic processing should be independent of age-related declines in attention or face memory. We tested whether holistic face processing ability is stable from late childhood to about age 60 in Eastern individuals
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