Crookes Kate, McKone Elinor
Department of Psychology, The Australian National University, ACT, Australia.
Cognition. 2009 May;111(2):219-47. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.02.004. Epub 2009 Mar 17.
Historically, it was believed the perceptual mechanisms involved in individuating faces developed only very slowly over the course of childhood, and that adult levels of expertise were not reached until well into adolescence. Over the last 10 years, there has been some erosion of this view by demonstrations that all adult-like behavioural properties are qualitatively present in young children and infants. Determining the age of maturity, however, requires quantitative comparison across age groups, a task made difficult by the need to disentangle development in face perception from development in all the other cognitive factors that affect task performance. Here, we argue that full quantitative maturity is reached early, by 5-7 years at the latest and possibly earlier. This is based on a comprehensive literature review of results in the 5-years-to-adult age range, with particular focus on the results of the few previous studies that are methodologically suitable for quantitative comparison of face effects across age, plus three new experiments testing development of holistic/configural processing (faces versus objects, disproportionate inversion effect), ability to encode novel faces (assessed via implicit memory) and face-space (own-age bias).
从历史上看，人们认为参与区分面孔的感知机制在儿童时期发展非常缓慢，直到青春期后期才达到成人水平的专业程度。在过去十年中，这种观点受到了一些冲击，因为有证据表明，所有类似成人的行为特征在幼儿和婴儿身上都已定性地存在。然而，确定成熟年龄需要对不同年龄组进行定量比较，而由于需要将面部感知的发展与所有其他影响任务表现的认知因素的发展区分开来，这项任务变得困难。在此，我们认为最晚在5至7岁时就已达到完全的定量成熟，甚至可能更早。这是基于对5岁至成人年龄范围结果的全面文献综述，特别关注之前少数在方法上适合对不同年龄的面部效应进行定量比较的研究结果，以及三项新的实验，这些实验测试了整体/构型加工（面孔与物体、不成比例的倒置效应）、编码新面孔的能力（通过内隐记忆评估）和面部空间（同年龄偏差）的发展情况。
