Nordt Marisa, Weigelt Sarah
Department of Developmental Neuropsychology, Institute of Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
PeerJ. 2017 May 18;5:e3253. doi: 10.7717/peerj.3253. eCollection 2017.
There is an ongoing debate on the question when face processing abilities mature. One aspect that has been part of this debate is the ability to recognize faces in and across different viewpoints. Here, we tested 128 participants consisting of school-age children (ages, 5-10 years) and adults (ages, 19-37 years) in two experiments to investigate the effects of different viewpoints (including front, three-quarter, profile view) on face recognition during development. Furthermore, we compared recognition performance for faces to that of another object category (cars). In the first experiment ( = 88) we tested if the pattern of performance for faces presented in different viewpoints is similar in school-aged children and adults. Participants completed a two-alternative-forced-choice (2AFC) memory task comprising images of both faces and cars in front, three-quarter and profile view, which were presented in the same viewpoint during learning and testing. In the second experiment ( = 40) we tested if face recognition is similarly affected by viewpoint changes in children and adults. In this experiment the 2AFC memory task included a change of viewpoint between learning and testing. While in both experiments we found higher recognition performance for faces with increasing age, the overall pattern of both viewpoint and viewpoint-change-effects and also the difference between view-change- and no-change-conditions was similar across age groups. In contrast to faces, no viewpoint effects were observed in cars (experiment 1), viewpoint change effects, however, were similar for cars and faces (experiment 2). In sum, our results suggest early maturity of the ability to recognize faces in and across different viewpoints.
关于面部处理能力何时成熟的问题，目前仍存在争论。这场争论的一个方面是在不同视角下以及跨不同视角识别面孔的能力。在此，我们进行了两项实验，测试了128名参与者，其中包括学龄儿童（5至10岁）和成年人（19至37岁），以研究不同视角（包括正面、四分之三侧面、侧面）对发育过程中面部识别的影响。此外，我们将面部识别表现与另一类物体（汽车）的识别表现进行了比较。在第一个实验（n = 88）中，我们测试了学龄儿童和成年人中不同视角呈现的面孔的表现模式是否相似。参与者完成了一项二选一强制选择（2AFC）记忆任务，该任务包括正面、四分之三侧面和侧面视角的面孔和汽车图像，这些图像在学习和测试过程中以相同视角呈现。在第二个实验（n = 40）中，我们测试了儿童和成年人中面部识别是否同样受到视角变化的影响。在这个实验中，2AFC记忆任务包括学习和测试之间的视角变化。虽然在两个实验中我们都发现随着年龄增长面部识别表现更高，但视角和视角变化效应的总体模式以及视角变化和无变化条件之间的差异在各年龄组中是相似的。与面孔不同，在汽车识别中未观察到视角效应（实验1），然而，汽车和面孔的视角变化效应是相似的（实验2）。总之，我们的结果表明在不同视角下以及跨不同视角识别面孔的能力早熟。
