Categorizing facial identities, emotions, and genders: attention to high- and low-spatial frequencies by children and adults.
Three age groups of participants (5-6 years, 7-8 years, adults) matched faces on the basis of facial identity. The procedure involved either low- or high-pass filtered faces or hybrid faces composed from two faces associated with different spatial bandwidths. The comparison stimuli were unfiltered faces. In the three age groups, the data indicated a significant bias for processing of low-pass information in priority. In a second task, participants were asked to identify the emotion (smiling or grimacing) or gender (male or female) of hybrid high-pass/low-pass faces. Opposite results emerged in the two tasks irrespective of the age group; the gender discrimination task indicated a bias for low-pass information, and the emotion task indicated a bias for high-pass information. These differences suggest independent processing routes for functionally different types of information such as emotion, gender, and identity. These routes are already established by 5 years of age.
Deruelle
Christine
C
Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, CNRS, 31, chemin Joseph Aiguier, 13402 Marseille cedex 20, France. chris@lnf.cnrs-mrs.fr
Fagot
Joël
J
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012737:Sex Factors; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception