ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2013 Apr;39(2):450-63. doi: 10.1037/a0029141. Epub 2012 Jun 25.
Face recognition performance improves during childhood, not reaching adult levels until late adolescence, yet the source of this improvement is unclear. Recognition of faces across changes in viewpoint appears particularly slow to develop. Poor cross-view recognition suggests that children's face representations may be more view specific than those of adults and is consistent with arguments that extensive experience with faces may be required to form representations that are robust to view changes. We conducted the first direct test of the view specificity of children's face representations by using face aftereffects to investigate whether children's face aftereffects transfer across changes in viewpoint. Using both the figural aftereffect (E1) and the identity aftereffect (E2) we showed that 8-year-old children's aftereffects transferred across substantial changes in viewpoint and that children did not differ from adults in the amount of transfer across viewpoint. These results suggest that children's coding of identity is no more view specific than that of adults and are consistent with a growing body of evidence indicating that the key perceptual mechanisms of face recognition emerge early in life.
人脸识别性能在儿童时期提高，直到青春期后期才达到成人水平，但这种提高的来源尚不清楚。跨视角的人脸识别似乎特别缓慢。跨视角识别能力差表明，儿童的面部表示可能比成人的更具视角特异性，这与广泛的面部经验可能是形成对视角变化具有鲁棒性的表示所必需的观点一致。我们通过使用面孔后效来首次直接测试儿童面孔表示的视角特异性，以调查儿童的面孔后效是否可以跨视角变化转移。我们使用图形后效（E1）和身份后效（E2）表明，8 岁儿童的后效可以跨越很大的视角变化，并且儿童在视角跨越方面与成人没有差异。这些结果表明，儿童的身份编码并不比成人更具视角特异性，这与越来越多的证据一致，这些证据表明，人脸识别的关键感知机制在生命早期就出现了。
