Face Recognition in 4- to 7-Year-Olds: Processing of Configural, Featural, and Paraphernalia Information

doi:10.1006/jecp.2001.2639

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume 80, Issue 4, December 2001, Pages 347-371

https://doi.org/10.1006/jecp.2001.2639 Get rights and content

Abstract

We tested 4- to 7-year-old children's face recognition by manipulating the faces' configural and featural information and the presence of superfluous paraphernalia. Results indicated that even with only a single 5-s exposure to the target face, most children could use configural and feature cues to make identity judgments. Repeated exposure and experimenter feedback enabled other children to do so as well. Even after attaining proficiency at identifying the target face, however, children's recognition was impaired when a superfluous hat was added to the face. Thus, although young children can process featural and configural face information, their memories are highly susceptible to disruption from superfluous paraphernalia.

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Citation Excerpt :
Given the behavioral evidence that 5- and 10-month-old infants could detect a face presented for 150 ms (Gelskov & Kouider, 2010) and the neural evidence that infants aged 5 months showed the face-related ERP component for faces presented for 100 ms (Kouider et al., 2013), we predicted that the behavioral and neural system of face recognition would change substantially from 5 to 8 months of age, as evidenced by the findings that configural processing would be mature at around 7 months (Schwarzer & Zauner, 2003). Although this development continues through around 6 years (Freire & Lee, 2001) and even adulthood (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike, & Meinhardt, 2014; Mondloch, Le Grand, & Maurer, 2002), the findings of 7 months suggested early stages of the development. Thus, the current study enabled us to track the developmental changes in face detection and identification of relatively younger infants of 5 to 8 months.
Our visual system can rapidly process stimuli relevant to our current behavioral goal within various irrelevant stimuli in natural scenes. This ability to detect and identify target stimuli during nontarget stimuli has been mainly studied in adults, so that the development of this high-level visual function has been unknown among infants, although it has been shown that 15-month-olds’ temporal thresholds of face visibility are close to those of adults. However, we demonstrate here that infants younger than 15 months can identify a target face among nontarget but meaningful scene images. In the current study, we investigated infants’ ability to detect and identify a face in a rapid serial visual presentation. Experiment 1 examined whether 5- to 8-month-olds could discriminate the difference in the presentation duration of visual streams (100 vs. 11 ms). Results showed that 7- and 8-month-olds successfully discriminated between the presentation durations. In Experiment 2, we examined whether 5- to 8-month-olds could detect the face presented for 100 ms and found that 7- and 8-month-olds could detect the face embedded in rapid serial visual streams. To further clarify the face processing at this age of infants, we tested whether infants could identify upright and inverted faces in rapid visual streams in Experiments 3a and 3b. The results showed that 7- and 8-month-olds identified upright faces, but not inverted faces, during the visual stream, which reflected face inversion effects. Overall, we suggest that the temporal speed of face processing at 7 and 8 months of age would be comparable to that of adults.
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Cognitive experimental and neuroscientific research in adults indicates that an important property of face perception is its specificity and reliance on configural processing. In addition, individual differences in face perception between adults cannot be entirely explained through general cognitive functioning and object cognition. Although recent years have witnessed growing interest in the development of face perception through childhood and adolescence, as yet, little is known about individual differences in configural face perception in this period of life, and whether these differences are face-specific. Here, we addressed these questions in a large sample (N = 338) drawn continuously from age six to 21. We applied a face composite task and a spatial manipulation task including stimulus inversion. Immediate and delayed face memory were assessed as covariates of configural face perception. Content specificity in configural face perception was tested by analogous tasks with houses as stimuli. In addition, we measured working memory and fluid intelligence. Our results show that there are large individual differences in configural face perception across the entire age range from six to 21 years. Supporting theories of early maturation, configural face perception was almost adult-like already at age six. Individual differences in configural face perception were related with immediate and delayed face memory and fluid intelligence across the whole age range. In sum, we provide novel evidence on large individual differences in configural face and object perception already in middle childhood, complementing findings from aging studies and providing new perspectives for further research.

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^☆: This study was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the second author. We thank three anonymous reviewers and also Rod Lindsay, Darwin Muir, and Lawrence Symons for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

^f2: Address correspondence and reprint requests to Alejo Freire, Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. E-mail: [email protected].

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Regular ArticleFace Recognition in 4- to 7-Year-Olds: Processing of Configural, Featural, and Paraphernalia Information☆

Abstract

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognition

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognition

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Fifty years of memory for names and faces: A cross-sectional approach

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Direct evidence for a consistent dissociation between structural facial discrimination and facial individuation in prosopagnosia

Brain & Cognition

In the eye of the beholder: The science of face perception

From piecemeal to configurational representation of faces

Science

Are faces perceived as configurations more by adults than by children?

Visual Cognition

Development of face recognition: A maturational component?

Developmental Psychology

Development of differential recognition of own- and other-race faces

Journal of Psychology

Development of face recognition

British Journal of Psychology

An information-processing approach to infant perception and cognition

Do the right and left hemispheres attend to the same visuospatial information within a face in infancy?

Developmental Neuropsychology

Hemispheric differences in face processing and brain maturation

Shape and pattern perception

Regular Article
Face Recognition in 4- to 7-Year-Olds: Processing of Configural, Featural, and Paraphernalia Information☆