The relative importance of heads, bodies, and movement to person recognition across development

Children have been shown to be worse at face recognition than adults even into their early teens. However, there is debate about whether this is due to face-specific mechanisms or general perceptual and memory development. Here, we considered a slightly different option-that children use different cues to recognition. To test this, we showed 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults whole body, head only, and body only stimuli that were either moving or static. These were shown in two tasks, a match-to-sample task with unfamiliar people and a learning task, to test recognition of experimentally familiar people. On the match-to-sample task, children were worse overall, but the pattern of results was the same for each age group. Matching was best with all cues or head available, and there was no effect of movement. However, matching was generally slower with moving stimuli, and 8-year-olds, but not 10-year-olds, were slower than adults. In general, more cues were faster than heads or bodies alone, but 8-year-olds were surprisingly slow when still bodies were shown alone. On the learning task, again all age groups showed similar patterns, with better performance for all cues. Both 8- and 10-year-olds were more likely to say that they knew someone unfamiliar. Again, movement did not provide a clear advantage. Overall, this study suggests that any differences in face recognition between adults and children are not due to differences in cue use and that instead these results are consistent with general improvements in memory

No face-like processing for objects-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks

In the debate between expertise and domain-specific explanations of "special" processing for faces, a common belief is that behavioural studies support the expertise hypothesis. The present article refutes this view, via a combination of new data and review. We tested dog experts with confirmed good individuation of exemplars of their breed-of-expertise. In all experiments, standard results were confirmed for faces. However, dog experts showed no face-like processing for dogs on three behavioural tasks (inversion; the composite paradigm; and sensitivity to contrast reversal). The lack of holistic/configural processing, indicated in the first two of these tests, is shown by review to be consistent rather than inconsistent with previous studies of objects-of-expertise

Left-right holistic integration of human bodies

Holistic integration of faces has been widely studied. More recently, investigations have explored whether similar processing is used for human bodies. Here we show that holistic processing, as measured by the composite task, does occur for bodies but is stronger for left and right halves than for top and bottom halves. We also found composite effects for left-right halves of inverted bodies. Standard composite effects were found for top halves of faces, tested as a control. We argue that our results suggest that holistic processing of faces and bodies might not exclusively occur for identification, but instead may also have evolved to aid communication and/or decisions about mate choice (through judging symmetry)

No childhood development of viewpoint-invariant face recognition : evidence from 8-year-olds and adults

Performance on laboratory face tasks improves across childhood, not reaching adult levels until adolescence. Debate surrounds the source of this development, with recent reviews suggesting that underlying face processing mechanisms are mature early in childhood and that the improvement seen on experimental tasks instead results from general cognitive/perceptual development. One face processing mechanism that has been argued to develop slowly is the ability to encode faces in a view-invariant manner (i.e., allowing recognition across changes in viewpoint). However, many previous studies have not controlled for general cognitive factors. In the current study, 8-year-olds and adults performed a recognition memory task with two study-test viewpoint conditions: same view (study front view, test front view) and change view (study front view, test three-quarter view). To allow quantitative comparison between children and adults, performance in the same view condition was matched across the groups by increasing the learning set size for adults. Results showed poorer memory in the change view condition than in the same view condition for both adults and children. Importantly, there was no quantitative difference between children and adults in the size of decrement in memory performance resulting from a change in viewpoint. This finding adds to growing evidence that face processing mechanisms are mature early in childhood

The nature of holistic processing in face and object recognition : current opinions

Despite serious advances in our understanding of how we cognitively and neurally achieve the amazing range of perceptual decisions we can make from faces, the picture is not complete. Recently, exciting developments have been made in terms of new questions to pose, new directions from which to approach existing questions, new research methods and insights from looking back and taking stock

The relationship between discrimination and memory for spacing and feature changes in houses

Adults need to discriminate between stimuli and recognize those previously seen. For faces, feature changes (e.g., different eyes) and spacing changes (e.g., distances between eyes) are important cues. In two experiments, we assessed the influence of these on discrimination and recognition of houses, a commonly used control in face studies. In both experiments, discrimination was better for feature than spacing changes. Memory for spacing changes was generally poor but aided by extra learning and intermixing change types. Conversely, memory for features was good, especially when there were few houses, and change type was blocked. Unexpectedly, memory was best for differences that might signal something about occupants (e.g., changes to garden or bins), perhaps akin to hairstyles for faces. Overall, results are consistent with previous work showing poor discrimination of spacing in non-face objects and extends them to show that, unlike for faces, spacing differences are also not well remembered

Sex-related preferences for real and doll faces versus real and toy objects in young infants and adults

Findings of previous studies demonstrate sex-related preferences for toys in 6-month-old infants; boys prefer nonsocial or mechanical toys such as cars, whereas girls prefer social toys such as dolls. Here, we explored the innate versus learned nature of this sex-related preferences using multiple pictures of doll and real faces (of men and women) as well as pictures of toy and real objects (cars and stoves). In total, 48 4- and 5-month-old infants (24 girls and 24 boys) and 48 young adults (24 women and 24 men) saw six trials of all relevant pairs of faces and objects, with each trial containing a different exemplar of a stimulus type. The infant results showed no sex-related preferences; infants preferred faces of men and women regardless of whether they were real or doll faces. Similarly, adults did not show sex-related preferences for social versus nonsocial stimuli, but unlike infants they preferred faces of the opposite sex over objects. These results challenge claims of an innate basis for sex-related preferences for toy real stimuli and suggest that sex-related preferences result from maturational and social development that continues into adulthood

Can we look past people's race? : the effect of combining race and a non-racial group affiliation on holistic processing

Face-memory is worse for races other than one’s own, in part because other-race faces are less holistically processed. Both experiential factors and social factors have been suggested as reasons for this other-race effect. Direct measures of holistic processing for race and a non-racial category in faces have never been employed, making it difficult to establish how experience and group-membership interact. The current study is the first to directly explore holistic processing of own and other-race faces, also classed by a non-racial category (university affiliation). Using a crossover design, White undergraduates (in Australia) completed the part-whole task for White (American) and Black South African faces attributed to the University of Western Sydney (own) and University of Sydney (other). Black South African undergraduates completed the same task for White and Black South African faces attributed to the University of Cape Town (own) and Stellenbosch University (other). It was hypothesised that own-race faces would be processed more holistically than other-race faces and own-university faces would be processed more holistically than other-university faces. Results showed a significant effect of race for White participants (White faces were matched more accurately than Black faces), and wholes were matched more accurately than parts, suggesting holistic processing, but only for White faces. No effect of university was found. Black South African participants, who have more experience with other-race faces, processed wholes better than parts irrespective of race and university category. Overall, results suggest that experiential factors of race outweigh any effects of a non-racial shared group membership. The quality of experience for the named populations, stimuli presentation and degree of individuation are discussed

Development of sensitivity to spacing versus feature changes in pictures of houses : evidence for slow development of a general spacing detection mechanism?

Adults are expert at recognizing faces, in part because of exquisite sensitivity to the spacing of facial features. Children are poorer than adults at recognizing facial identity and less sensitive to spacing differences. Here we examined the specificity of the immaturity by comparing the ability of 8-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and adults to discriminate houses differing in the spacing between features versus those differing in the shape of the features themselves. By 8. years of age, children were more accurate for discriminations involving the feature set compared with the spacing set, and the difference in accuracy compared with adults was greater for the spacing set than for the feature set. Importantly, when sets were matched in difficulty for adults, this greater immaturity on the spacing set than on the feature set remained. The results suggest that, at least by age 8, immaturities in sensitivity to the spacing of features may be related to immaturities in general perceptual mechanisms rather than face-specific mechanisms

Infant perceptual development for faces and spoken words : an integrated approach

There are obvious differences between recognizing faces and recognizing spoken words or phonemes that might suggest development of each capability requires different skills. Recognizing faces and perceiving spoken language, however, are in key senses extremely similar endeavors. Both perceptual processes are based on richly variable, yet highly structured input from which the perceiver needs to extract categorically meaningful information. This similarity could be reflected in the perceptual narrowing that occurs within the first year of life in both domains. We take the position that the perceptual and neurocognitive processes by which face and speech recognition develop are based on a set of common principles. One common principle is the importance of systematic variability in the input as a source of information rather than noise. Experience of this variability leads to perceptual tuning to the critical properties that define individual faces or spoken words versus their membership in larger groupings of people and their language communities. We argue that parallels can be drawn directly between the principles responsible for the development of face and spoken language perception