Exploring the perceptual spaces of faces, cars and birds in children and adults

Abstract

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, 11–12 and adults were presented with 50/50 morphs of typical and atypical face, bird and car parent images. Participants were asked to judge whether the 50/50 morph more strongly resembled the typical or the atypical parent image. Young and older children and adults showed a systematic bias to the atypical faces and birds, but no bias toward the atypical cars. Collectively, these findings argue that by the age of 3, children encode and organize faces, birds and cars in a perceptual space that is strikingly similar to that of adults. Category organization for both children and adults follows Krumhansl’s (1978) distance-density principle in which the similarity between two exemplars is jointly determined by their physical appearance and the density of neighboring exemplars in the perceptual space.

Insights into the development of face recognition mechanisms revealed by face aftereffects

“…The fact that children as young as 4 experience face aftereffects suggests that children represent faces in a multidimensional face space that has some adult‐like properties from at least age 4. Consistent with this view is evidence that 4‐year olds can judge distinctiveness in natural and manipulated faces (Johnston & Ellis, 1995; McKone & Boyer, 2006) and show an atypicality bias (50/50 morphs between a typical and atypical/distinctive face more strongly resemble the atypical face) that is comparable to that of adults (Tanaka, Meixner, & Kantner, 2011). Further evidence that children code identity in a face space with some adult‐like properties comes from the finding that 6‐year‐old children can perceive caricatures, which exaggerate the way a face deviates from the average, as more distinctive than anti‐caricatures, which make a face more like the average (Chang, Levine, & Benson, 2002).…”

Development of face processing

“…Recent work suggests that by age 5, the face space of young children approximates the face space demonstrated by young adults. 26 The face-space model also provides an explanation of the other-race effect. The origin of scientific interest in this area stemmed from an observation that is still made by people today, which is: 'they (people of other races) all look the same to me'.…”

Fishy fishes: the typicality of object stimuli used to assess children's language in the Reynell Development Language Scales—III

“…Jerger and Damian 2005). Other studies limited to older children due to utilizing active judgement tasks with, for example, morphed face and bird stimuli have found evidence of more adult‐like categorization from age 3 years (Tanaka et al 2010). Younger children were not tested due to the nature of the task.…”