The effects of information type (features versus configuration) and location (eyes versus mouth) on the development of face perception

摘要

The goal of the present study was to investigate the development of face processing strategies in a perceptual discrimination task. Children ages 7 to 12 years and young adults were administered the Face Dimensions Task. In the Face Dimensions Task, participants were asked to judge whether two simultaneously presented faces were the “same” or “different”. For the “same” trials, the two faces were identical. For the “different” trials, the faces differed either in the spacing between the eyes, the spacing between the nose and the mouth, the size of the eyes or the size of the mouth. The main finding was that 7- to 10-year-old children showed no difference in their ability to discriminate differences in eye size and eye spacing but showed a poor ability to discriminate differences in nose and mouth spacing and to a lesser extent, mouth size. The developmental lag between nose-mouth discriminations and the other featural and configural discriminations was reduced in older children and eliminated by young adulthood. These results indicate that the type of the face information (i.e., configural versus featural) and its location (i.e., eye versus mouth) jointly contribute to the development of face perception abilities.