title: The effects of information type (features vs. configuration) and location (eyes vs. mouth) on the development of face perception.
abstract: The goal of the current study was to investigate the development of face processing strategies in a perceptual discrimination task. Children (7-12 years of age) and young adults were administered the Face Dimensions Task. In the Face Dimensions Task, participants were asked to judge whether two simultaneously presented faces were the "same" or "different". For the "same" trials, the two faces were identical. For the "different" trials, the faces differed in either the spacing between the eyes, the spacing between the nose and the mouth, the size of the eyes, or the size of the mouth. The main finding was that 7- to 10-year-old children showed no difference in their ability to discriminate differences in eye size and eye spacing but showed a poor ability to discriminate differences in nose and mouth spacing and, to a lesser extent, mouth size. The developmental lag between nose-mouth discriminations and the other featural and configural discriminations was reduced in older children and eliminated by young adulthood. These results indicate that the type of face information (i.e., configural vs. featural) and its location (i.e., eye vs. mouth) jointly contribute to the development of face perception abilities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 3P5, Canada. Electronic address: jtanaka@uvic.ca.
authors.forename: James W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Tanaka
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.
authors.forename: Paul C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Quinn
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 3P5, Canada.
authors.forename: Buyun
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 3P5, Canada.
authors.forename: Kim
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Maynard
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 3P5, Canada.
authors.forename: Natalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Huxtable
authors.affiliation: Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition, CNRS UMR 5105, Université Pierre Mendès France, 38040 Grenoble, France.
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Pascalis
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D005123:Eye; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D009055:Mouth; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D002666:Psychology, Child; D021641:Recognition, Psychology
keywords: Configural processing; Face perception; Face recognition; Face strategies; Featural processing
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