title: The relative importance of heads, bodies, and movement to person recognition across development.
abstract: Children have been shown to be worse at face recognition than adults even into their early teens. However, there is debate about whether this is due to face-specific mechanisms or general perceptual and memory development. Here, we considered a slightly different option--that children use different cues to recognition. To test this, we showed 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults whole body, head only, and body only stimuli that were either moving or static. These were shown in two tasks, a match-to-sample task with unfamiliar people and a learning task, to test recognition of experimentally familiar people. On the match-to-sample task, children were worse overall, but the pattern of results was the same for each age group. Matching was best with all cues or head available, and there was no effect of movement. However, matching was generally slower with moving stimuli, and 8-year-olds, but not 10-year-olds, were slower than adults. In general, more cues were faster than heads or bodies alone, but 8-year-olds were surprisingly slow when still bodies were shown alone. On the learning task, again all age groups showed similar patterns, with better performance for all cues. Both 8- and 10-year-olds were more likely to say that they knew someone unfamiliar. Again, movement did not provide a clear advantage. Overall, this study suggests that any differences in face recognition between adults and children are not due to differences in cue use and that instead these results are consistent with general improvements in memory.
authors.affiliation: School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia; MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia; Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Electronic address: dr.r.robbins@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Rachel A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Robbins
authors.affiliation: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
authors.forename: Max
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Coltheart
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006257:Head; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D060726:Torso; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Biological motion; Body perception; Face perception; Familiar person recognition; Unfamiliar person recognition; Visual development