Ewing Louise, Karmiloff-Smith Annette, Farran Emily K, Smith Marie L
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom; ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western, Australia; School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2017 Sep;166:56-66. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.017. Epub 2017 May 26.
Facial expression recognition skills are known to improve across childhood and adolescence, but the mechanisms driving the development of these important social abilities remain unclear. This study investigates directly whether there are qualitative differences in child and adult processing strategies for these emotional stimuli. With a novel adaptation of the Bubbles reverse-correlation paradigm (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001), we added noise to expressive face stimuli and presented sub-sets of randomly sampled information from each image at different locations and spatial frequency bands across experimental trials. Results from our large developmental sample: 71 young children (6 -9years), 69 older children (10-13years) and 54 adults, uniquely reveal profiles of strategic information-use for categorisations of fear, sadness, happiness and anger at all ages. All three groups relied upon a distinct set of key facial features for each of these expressions, with fine-tuning of this diagnostic information (features and spatial frequency) observed across developmental time. Reported variability in the developmental trajectories for different emotional expressions is consistent with the notion of functional links between the refinement of information-use and processing ability.
众所周知，面部表情识别能力在儿童期和青少年期会不断提高，但驱动这些重要社交能力发展的机制仍不清楚。本研究直接调查儿童和成人对这些情绪刺激的加工策略是否存在质的差异。通过对Bubbles反向相关范式（Gosselin & Schyns，2001）进行新颖的改编，我们在富有表现力的面部刺激上添加噪声，并在不同的实验试次中，在不同位置和空间频段呈现来自每张图像的随机采样信息子集。我们来自大型发展样本（71名幼儿（6 - 9岁）、69名大龄儿童（10 - 13岁）和54名成年人）的结果独特地揭示了所有年龄段对恐惧、悲伤、快乐和愤怒进行分类时策略性信息使用的概况。所有三组在对这些表情进行分类时都依赖于一组不同的关键面部特征，并且在整个发育过程中观察到了这种诊断信息（特征和空间频率）的微调。不同情绪表情发展轨迹中报告的变异性与信息使用的细化和加工能力之间功能联系的概念一致。
