Short Lindsey A, Lee Kang, Fu Genyue, Mondloch Catherine J
Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada.
Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2014 Oct;126:161-77. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.04.004. Epub 2014 Jun 14.
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.
成年人在人脸识别方面的专业能力被归因于基于规范的编码。此外，成年人拥有针对各种面部类别（如种族、性别、年龄）的可分离规范，这些规范似乎通过减少面部共享信息中的冗余，并确保仅使用相关维度对给定类别中的面部进行编码，从而提高识别能力。尽管5岁儿童使用基于规范的编码来处理自己种族的面孔，但对于他们面部空间的组织和细化却知之甚少。本研究调查了5岁儿童是否依赖特定类别的规范，以及经验是否有助于可分离面部原型的发展。在实验1中，我们研究了中国5岁儿童是否表现出种族相关的对立后效应，以及在白种人和中国5岁儿童中，后效应在不同面部种族之间转移的程度。两个参与种族都表现出后效应在不同面部种族之间的部分转移；然而，没有证据表明存在种族相关的对立后效应。为了研究经验是否有助于特定类别原型的发展，我们调查了大量接触中国面孔的白种人5岁儿童中是否存在种族相关的后效应（实验2），然后对另外两组5岁儿童进行了测试，这两组儿童对另外两个类别有相当多的经验：性别（男性/女性面孔）和年龄（成人/儿童面孔）（实验3）。在所有三个类别中，5岁儿童都没有表现出类别相关的对立后效应。这些结果表明，5岁是一个阶段，其特征是用于不同类别面孔的规范和相关编码维度的分离最小，并表明专家级面部处理背后的机制在整个童年时期都会得到细化。
