Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2011 Sep;47(5):1472-8. doi: 10.1037/a0024494.
Adults preferentially use information from the left side of face images to judge gender, emotion, and identity. In this study, we examined the development of this visual-field bias over middle childhood (5-10 years). Our goal was to both characterize the developmental trajectory of the left-side bias (should one exist) and examine the selectivity of the phenomenon. We used own- versus other-species faces (human and monkey faces) to ask whether the left-side bias was equally strong for categories with which children have vastly different amounts of experience. We found that the left-side bias did show both a developmental trend over the age range we considered and distinct category selectivity; for human faces the preference for the left side of the image increased across the age range tested, but for monkey faces it did not. We discuss our results in the context of experience-dependent perceptual narrowing during development.
成年人更倾向于使用人脸图像左侧的信息来判断性别、情绪和身份。在本研究中，我们考察了从中年儿童期（5-10 岁）到成年期视觉偏向的发展过程。我们的目标是描述这种左侧偏向（如果存在的话）的发展轨迹，并检验这种现象的选择性。我们使用自己的物种面孔（人类和猴子的面孔）和其他物种面孔（人类和猴子的面孔）来问一个问题，即这种左侧偏向是否对儿童具有不同数量经验的类别同样强烈。我们发现，这种左侧偏向确实表现出了在我们所考虑的年龄范围内的发展趋势和明显的类别选择性；对于人类面孔，对图像左侧的偏好随着测试年龄的增加而增加，但对于猴子面孔则没有。我们根据发展过程中经验依赖性感知变窄的情况讨论了我们的结果。
