Event Abstract Back to Event Nine-year-old children use norm-based coding to visually represent facial expression Nichola Burton1*, Linda Jeffery1, Andy Skinner2, Christopher P. Benton2 and Gillian Rhodes1 1 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australia 2 University of Bristol, United Kingdom i. Background Children are less skilled than adults at judging facial expression; at age ten they still perform worse than adults in expression judgement tasks. It may be that at this age children have not yet developed adult-like mechanisms for visually representing faces. Adults are thought to represent faces in a multidimensional face-space, and have been shown to code the expression of a face relative to the norm or average face in face-space. Norm-based coding is economical and adaptive, and could explain why adults are more sensitive to facial expression than children. This study investigated the coding system that nine-year-old children use to represent facial expression. ii. Methods An adaptation aftereffect paradigm was used to test 24 adults and 18 children (9 years 2 months to 9 years 11 months old). Participants adapted to anti-expressions of varying extremity. They then judged the expression of an average expression. Adaptation creates an aftereffect that makes the test face look like the expression opposite that of the adaptor; if coding is norm-based, we expect larger aftereffects for more extreme adaptors. iii. Results Consistent with the predictions of norm-based coding, aftereffects were larger for more extreme adaptors in both the child and adult groups. iv. Discussion Results indicate that, like adults, children's coding of facial expressions is norm-based by nine years of age. This is consistent with other recent findings suggesting that qualitatively adult-like face processing mechanisms develop earlier in childhood than was previously thought. Acknowledgements We thank the school staff, students, and parents who participated in this study. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Cognition and Its Disorders (Project CE110001021) and an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship to Gillian Rhodes (Project DP0877379). The work was also supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-000-22-4319 awarded to Christopher P. Benton. Keywords: face perception, Expression, Children, development, adaptation Conference: ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013. Presentation Type: Oral Topic: Sensation and Perception Citation: Burton N, Jeffery L, Skinner A, Benton CP and Rhodes G (2013). Nine-year-old children use norm-based coding to visually represent facial expression. Conference Abstract: ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00171 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Oct 2013; Published Online: 25 Nov 2013. * Correspondence: Ms. Nichola Burton, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Perth, Australia, burton01@student.uwa.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Nichola Burton Linda Jeffery Andy Skinner Christopher P Benton Gillian Rhodes Google Nichola Burton Linda Jeffery Andy Skinner Christopher P Benton Gillian Rhodes Google Scholar Nichola Burton Linda Jeffery Andy Skinner Christopher P Benton Gillian Rhodes PubMed Nichola Burton Linda Jeffery Andy Skinner Christopher P Benton Gillian Rhodes Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.