Developmental Commonalities between Object and Face Recognition in Adolescence

Abstract

In the visual perception literature, the recognition of faces has often been contrasted with that of non-face objects, in terms of differences with regard to the role of parts, part relations and holistic processing. However, recent evidence from developmental studies has begun to blur this sharp distinction. We review evidence for a protracted development of object recognition that is reminiscent of the well-documented slow maturation observed for faces. The prolonged development manifests itself in a retarded processing of metric part relations as opposed to that of individual parts and offers surprising parallels to developmental accounts of face recognition, even though the interpretation of the data is less clear with regard to holistic processing. We conclude that such results might indicate functional commonalities between the mechanisms underlying the recognition of faces and non-face objects, which are modulated by different task requirements in the two stimulus domains.

Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

“…And by their second birthday, children extend visual concepts appropriately after experiencing one or few exemplars of a novel category (i.e., "one-shot" learning) (Carey & Bartlett, 1978;Pereira & Smith, 2009;Soja, Carey, & Spelke, 1991) and identify abstract exemplars as belonging to those categories (Pereira & Smith, 2009). However, mounting evidence suggests that children's visual recognition abilities have a relatively extended developmental trajectory throughout middle childhood (for reviews, see Juttner, Wakui, Petters, & Davidoff, 2016;Nishimura, Scherf, & Behrmann, 2009). For example, children become steadily better at discriminating between perceptually similar exemplars of scenes, objects, bodies, and faces from 5-10 years of age (Weigelt et al, 2014) and increasingly skilled at recognizing objects presented in unusual poses or 3D rotations, reaching adult-like levels only in adolescence (Bova et al, 2007;Dekker, Mareschal, Sereno, & Johnson, 2011;Nishimura, Scherf, Zachariou, Tarr, & Behrmann, 2015).…”

“…For example, children become steadily better at discriminating between perceptually similar exemplars of scenes, objects, bodies, and faces from 5-10 years of age (Weigelt et al, 2014) and increasingly skilled at recognizing objects presented in unusual poses or 3D rotations, reaching adult-like levels only in adolescence (Bova et al, 2007;Dekker, Mareschal, Sereno, & Johnson, 2011;Nishimura, Scherf, Zachariou, Tarr, & Behrmann, 2015). These improvements may partly be because children increasingly attend to the relationship between object parts and features as they approach adolescence (Juttner, Muller, & Rentschler, 2006;Juttner et al, 2016;Mash, 2006). In turn, improvements in children's recognition abilities are reflected in changes in how visual cortex encodes different objects and scenes (Balas & Saville, 2020;Cohen et al, 2019;Dekker et al, 2011;Gomez, Natu, Jeska, Barnett, & Grill-Spector, 2018;Kersey, Clark, Lussier, Mahon, & Cantlon, 2015;Nishimura et al, 2015).…”

Animacy and object size are reflected in perceptual similarity computations by the preschool years

“…These perceptual representations may also continue to be refined well beyond the preschool years. Indeed, some work suggests that high-level object recognition abilities appear to mature gradually throughout middle-childhood (for reviews, see Jüttner et al, 2016;Nishimura et al, 2009), raising the possibility that children's perceptual representations for the animacy/size distinctions may also be refined with continued experience. For example, children may learn which kinds of shapes are most typical of certain animals, and this information may be integrated into their animacy representations.…”

Developmental changes in the ability to draw distinctive features of object categories

“…As children learn the diagnostic properties of objects and how to recognize them, they may express this knowledge in their drawings of these categories. Indeed, children's visual recognition abilities have a protracted developmental trajectory: configural visual processing-the ability to process relationships between object parts (Juttner, Muller, & Rentschler, 2006;Juttner, Wakui, Petters, & Davidoff, 2016)-may mature slowly throughout childhood, as does the ability to recognize objects under unusual poses or lighting (Bova et al, 2007).…”