The effects of information type (features vs. configuration) and location (eyes vs. mouth) on the development of face perception
Résumé
The goal of the current study was to investigate the development of
face processing strategies in a perceptual discrimination task. Children
(7–12 years of age) 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 in either
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 face information (i.e., configural vs. featural) and
its location (i.e., eye vs. mouth) jointly contribute to the development
of face perception abilities.