No evidence for childhood development in viewpoint invariant face encoding K Crookes1, R Robbins2 |
|---|
1CCD & School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Australia |
| Performance on face recognition tasks improves across childhood not reaching adult levels until adolescence. Debate surrounds the source of this development with recent reviews suggesting underlying face processing mechanisms are mature early in childhood and that the improvement seen on recognition tasks instead results from general cognitive/perceptual development. One face processing mechanism which has been argued to develop slowly is the ability to encode faces in a view invariant manner (i.e., allowing recognition across changes in viewpoint). However previous studies have not controlled for general cognitive factors. In the present study 7-8 year-olds and adults performed a recognition memory task with two study-test viewpoint conditions: same-view (study front view, test front view); change-view (study front view, test three-quarter view). To allow quantitative comparison between children and adults, performance in the same-view condition was matched across the groups by reducing the learning set size for children. Results showed poorer memory in the change-view than the same-view condition in both adults and children. Importantly there was no quantitative difference between children and adults in the size of decrement in memory performance resulting from a change in viewpoint. This finding adds to growing evidence that face processing mechanisms are mature in early childhood. |
| Up Home |
|---|