Department of Psychology, Bournemouth University, Poole, UK.
College of Health and Life Sciences, Division of Psychology, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK.
Br J Psychol. 2021 Aug;112(3):628-644. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12480. Epub 2020 Oct 21.
It has long been known that premature birth and/or low birthweight can lead to general difficulties in cognitive and emotional functioning throughout childhood. However, the influence of these factors on more specific processes has seldom been addressed, despite their potential to account for wide individual differences in performance that often appear innate. Here, we examined the influence of gestation and birthweight on adults' face perception and face memory skills. Performance on both sub-processes was predicted by birthweight and birthweight-for-gestation, but not gestation alone. Evidence was also found for the domain-specificity of these effects: No perinatal measure correlated with performance on object perception or memory tasks, but they were related to the size of the face inversion effect on the perceptual test. This evidence indicates a novel, very early influence on individual differences in face recognition ability, which persists into adulthood, influences face-processing strategy itself, and may be domain-specific.
长期以来，人们一直知道早产和/或低出生体重会导致儿童期认知和情感功能的普遍困难。然而，尽管这些因素可能导致表现出的广泛个体差异往往是天生的，但它们对更具体的过程的影响很少被涉及。在这里，我们研究了妊娠期和出生体重对成年人面孔感知和面孔记忆技能的影响。出生体重和出生体重与妊娠期的比值都可以预测这两个子过程的表现，但仅妊娠期则不行。这些影响的特定领域证据也被发现：没有产前指标与物体感知或记忆任务的表现相关，但它们与知觉测试中面孔反转效应的大小有关。这一证据表明，在个体差异对面孔识别能力的影响上存在一种新的、非常早期的影响，这种影响持续到成年期，影响着面孔处理策略本身，并且可能是特定于领域的。
