Do young children recognize faces differently than older children and adults? Previous research (Carey & Diamond, 1977) has suggested that, before the age of 8, children recognize a face by its individual features; after the age of 8, they switch to a whole-face (holistic) recognition strategy. The part-whole paradigm provides a suitable test for the encoding switch hypothesis. In this paradigm, memory for a face part is probed when the part is presented in isolation and in the whole face. The difference in performance between the two test conditions serves as an index of holistic processing. Results from such studies reveal that even 6-year-olds remember parts from upright faces better when tested in the whole-face context than in isolation. When faces are inverted, the holistic processes of young children and older children are disrupted. These results indicate that counter to the encoding switch hypothesis, children recognize faces holistically by 6 years of age.

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The contributions of text meaning, new between-word associations, and single-word repetition to priming in text rereading in younger and older adults, and in patients with Alzheimer's disease. (AD), were assessed in Experiment 1. Explicit recognition memory for text was also assessed. Equivalent single-word and between-word priming was observed for all groups, even though patients with AD showed impaired explicit memory for individual words in the text. The contribution of generalized reading task skill to priming in meaningless text rereading in younger adults was assessed in Experiment 2. Generalized reading task skill was also found to contribute to priming. These results reveal 3 mechanisms of priming: new between-word associations for meaningful and meaningless text, individual word repetition for meaningless text, and general task or skill factors for meaningless text. All priming mechanisms appear to be intact in older adults and in patients with AD.

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