Recognition of faces of different species: a developmental study between 5 and 8 years of age

Abstract

There is developmental progression in the ability to recognize human faces (HF) during childhood, accompanied by qualitative differences in what children perceive and remember. The best known example is that of sensitivity to vertical orientation: while there is age-related improvement in recognizing upright faces, upside-down ones show no recognition improvement. It is believed by some investigators to be a sign of developing faceexpertise over the first 10 years or so of life. If expertise, based on experience with many individuals, is the basis for the development of the inversion-effect, faces from other species should not induce inversion-effects. In two experiments, we explored the expertise phenomenon by testing recognition of faces of different animal species with children between 5 and 10 years of age. Our results failed to show any developmental changes in the processing of faces of own-and other-species. Copyright

Domain specificity versus expertise: factors influencing distinct processing of faces

“…However, if face specificity is based on the existence of particular characteristics of the face, which are common to faces of apes and humans, the N170 should be similar for these two stimulus categories. An empirical foundation for this logic has recently been provided by a study in which face inversion effects for human faces, monkey faces and faces of sheep were examined in 5-8-year-old children (Pascalis, Demont, de Haan, & Campbell, 2001). In complete agreement with our rationale, across face orientation, recognition was better for human than for monkey faces (suggesting less expertise for the latter than the former category).…”

“…Because the participants examined in this experiment were not experts in processing faces of apes, the implication of this pattern is that the perceptual mechanism associated with the N170 is discriminatively engaged by human faces and by other stimuli that preserve perceptual characteristics of the human face, even if the particular face category is not frequently encountered. As suggested by the contrast between the similarity of inversion effects for monkey and human faces and the absence of such an effect for sheep faces (Pascalis et al, 2001), this pattern reflects a similarity in the representational template (or processing strategy) for recognizing human and ape faces (Campbell, Pascalis, Coleman, Wallace, & Benson, 1997). A possible implication of this pattern for the specificity/expertise debate is that the expertise effect on the N170 observed in groups of dog breeders and bird watchers (Tanaka & Curran, 2001) indeed reflected the contribution of other mechanisms, for example attentional factors involved in the modulation of the visual N1.…”

Recognition of monkey faces by monkey experts

“…They categorise as ''human-like'' a hybrid face composed of 60% monkey and only 40% human facial elements, which is not the case for hybrid faces composed of the same respective proportions of cow and human. Nevertheless, adults (Dufour et al 2004) and children (Pascalis et al 2001) recognise human faces more accurately than monkey faces in two-alternative forcedchoice tasks. In addition, adults and 9-month-old children discriminate automatically between two human faces but not between two macaque faces (Pascalis and Bachevalier 1998;Pascalis et al 2002) as assessed in a visual paired comparison (VPC) task.…”

“…Inverting faces is known to affect the processing of second-order relationships between facial features; as such, this inversion effect is commonly used to detect ''face-like'' expertise in potential experts. With regard to monkey faces, non-expert humans show an inversion effect that is not otherwise observed for sheep faces in an explicit recognition task (Pascalis et al 2001). When tested in a similar but more demanding task (Dufour et al 2004), naive adults do not recognise monkey faces whatever their orientation, while they still recognise upright human faces (but not inverted ones) above chance level.…”

The Development of Face Recognition; Hippocampal and Frontal Lobe Contributions Determined with MEG

“…Face processing, in fact, continues to evolve with age, with older adults performing face processing tasks using different strategies than younger adults (Chaby et al 2011;Gunning-Dixon et al 2003). Skill in face recognition has been attributed in part to acquiring expertise in processing the configural structure of faces (e.g., Baenninger 1994;Mondloch et al 2006;Maurer et al 2002), often assessed with the use of inverted faces, as face inversion disrupts configural more than featural processing of faces (Yin 1969;Rhodes et al 1993), in children as well as adults (Pascalis et al 2001;Tanaka et al 1998;Mondloch et al 2002).…”