Attractiveness Judgments and Discrimination of Mommies and Grandmas: Perceptual Tuning for Young Adult Faces

Highlights •3- and 7-year-olds judged young and older face pairs: one normal and one distorted.•Attractiveness judgments (referencing a norm) were more accurate for young faces.•Performance on a match-to-sample task was also more accurate for young faces.•Our results have implications for how face space becomes optimized for young faces.•We discuss implications for domain-general vs. domain-specific development