title: Category-specific face prototypes are emerging, but not yet mature, in 5-year-old children.
abstract: Adults' expertise in face recognition has been attributed to norm-based coding. Moreover, adults possess separable norms for a variety of face categories (e.g., race, sex, age) that appear to enhance recognition by reducing redundancy in the information shared by faces and ensuring that only relevant dimensions are used to encode faces from a given category. Although 5-year-old children process own-race faces using norm-based coding, little is known about the organization and refinement of their face space. The current study investigated whether 5-year-olds rely on category-specific norms and whether experience facilitates the development of dissociable face prototypes. In Experiment 1, we examined whether Chinese 5-year-olds show race-contingent opposing aftereffects and the extent to which aftereffects transfer across face race among Caucasian and Chinese 5-year-olds. Both participant races showed partial transfer of aftereffects across face race; however, there was no evidence for race-contingent opposing aftereffects. To examine whether experience facilitates the development of category-specific prototypes, we investigated whether race-contingent aftereffects are present among Caucasian 5-year-olds with abundant exposure to Chinese faces (Experiment 2) and then tested separate groups of 5-year-olds with two other categories with which they have considerable experience: sex (male/female faces) and age (adult/child faces) (Experiment 3). Across all three categories, 5-year-olds showed no category-contingent opposing aftereffects. These results demonstrate that 5 years of age is a stage characterized by minimal separation in the norms and associated coding dimensions used for faces from different categories and suggest that refinement of the mechanisms that underlie expert face processing occurs throughout childhood.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada.
authors.forename: Lindsey A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Short
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang 321004, China.
authors.forename: Genyue
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada. Electronic address: cmondloch@brocku.ca.
authors.forename: Catherine J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Mondloch
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D044469:Racial Groups / Q000145:classification / Q000523:psychology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012737:Sex Factors
keywords: Aftereffects; Category-specific prototypes; Children’s face space; Experience; Norm-based coding; Race