The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be modulated by experience. Moreover, in each of the 3 experiments, differences in the magnitude of the observed face inversion effect for each age class of faces were taken to reflect a difference in the processing strategies used to recognize the faces of each age. Evidence from Experiment 3 indicates that these strategies can be tuned by experience. The data are discussed with reference to an experience-based framework for face recognition.
The current study compared the development of holistic processing for faces and non-face visual objects by testing for the composite effect for faces and frontal images of cars in 3- to 5-year-old children and adults in a series of four experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task. Results showed that a composite effect for faces was present as early as 3 1/2 years, and none of the age groups tested showed signs of a composite effect for cars. These findings provide the first demonstration that holistic processing is already selective for faces in early childhood, and confirm existing evidence that sensitivity to holistic information in faces does not increase from 4 years to adulthood.
Research has shown that experience acquired in infancy dramatically affects face-discrimination abilities. Yet much less is known about whether face processing retains any flexibility after the 1st year of life. Here, we show that early experience with an individual infant face can modulate the recognition performance of 3-year-old children and the perceptual processes they use to recognize infant faces (Experiment 1). Similar experience acquired in adulthood does not produce measurable effects (Experiment 2). We also show that the effects of early-acquired experience with an infant face become dormant during development in the absence of continued experience (Experiment 3) and can be reactivated in adulthood by reexposure to the original experience (Experiment 2). Overall, the results indicate that early experience can preserve the face-processing system from the loss of plasticity that would otherwise take place between childhood and adulthood.
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