From Piecemeal to Configurational Representation of Faces

Abstract

Unlike older children and adults, children of less than about 10 years of age remember photographs of faces presented upside down almost as well as those shown upright and are easily fooled by simple disguises. The development at age 10 of the ability to encode orientation-specific configurational aspects of a face may reflect completion of certain maturational changes in the right cerebral hemisphere.

Receiver operating characteristic analysis of age-related changes in lineup performance

“…The late maturation hypothesis posits that children do not remember faces as accurately as adults because face processing ability does not fully develop until at least adolescence (see Carey & Diamond, 1977;Mondloch, Le Grand, & Maurer, 2002). Evidence from the basic face processing literature suggests that children's sensitivity may be poorer because they tend to engage in more feature-based rather than configural-based processing (Mondloch, Geldart, Maurer, & Le Grand, 2003: Mondloch, et al, 2002Schwarzer, 2000).…”

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

“…Configural processing is distinguished from featural, componential, or local processing, where features are processed in a piecemeal oranalytic way. Carey and Diamond (1977) suggested that children do not use configuralinformation until they are 10 years of age. Children under age 10 would tend to base their judgments on local information such as features or paraphernalia.…”

“…Moreover, they found no inversion effect (i.e., children were not impaired by presenting a face upside down), whereas such an effect is known to be strong in adults (Yin, 1969). The inversion effect is considered to demonstrate the weight of configural information; by modifying the relative position of features (e.g., the eyes are above the nose in an upright face, whereas they are below the nose in an upside-down face), inversion of a face interferes with configural processing .However, Carey and Diamond's (1977) hypothesis has been challenged by studies demonstrating that children under 10 years of age can process faces configurally (Baenninger, 1994;Carey & Diamond, 1994;Flin, 1985;Freire& Lee, 2001;Tanaka, Kay, Grinnell, StansWeld, &Szechter, 1998). Notably, an inversion effectwas reported at younger than 10 years of age.…”

A cross-syndrome study of the development of holistic face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome

“…While infants show an earlier preference for faces (e.g., Morton & Johnson, 1991), investigation of the subsequent developmental course of face recognition has revealed different underlying processes and strategies that improve at different rates (e.g., Carey & Diamond, 1977;Freire & Lee, 2001;Maurer, LeGrand & Mondloch, 2002). In this paper, we focus on one of these processes, holistic processing, and examine its developmental profile in typically developing children and children with three developmental disorders, namely, autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome.…”