Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Aug;232:105676. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105676. Epub 2023 Mar 10.
The timing of the developmental emergence of holistic face processing and its sensitivity to experience in early childhood are somewhat controversial topics. To investigate holistic face perception in early childhood, we used an online testing platform and administered a two-alternative forced-choice task to 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. The children saw pairs of composite faces and needed to decide whether the faces were the same or different. To determine whether experience with masked faces may have negatively affected holistic processing, we also administered a parental questionnaire to assess the children's exposure to masked faces during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that all three age groups performed holistic face processing when the faces were upright (Experiment 1) but not when the faces were inverted (Experiment 2), that response accuracy increased with age, and that response accuracy was not related to degree of exposure to masked faces. These results indicate that holistic face processing is relatively robust in early childhood and that short-term exposure to partially visible faces does not negatively affect young children's holistic face perception.
整体面部加工的发展出现时间及其在幼儿期对经验的敏感性是一些有争议的话题。为了研究幼儿期的整体面部感知，我们使用在线测试平台，对 4 岁、5 岁和 6 岁的儿童进行了二选一的强制选择任务。儿童看到一对组合的面部，并需要判断面部是否相同或不同。为了确定是否对蒙面人脸的经验可能会对整体处理产生负面影响，我们还对父母进行了问卷调查，以评估儿童在 COVID-19 大流行期间对蒙面人脸的接触情况。我们发现，所有三个年龄组在面部直立时都进行了整体面部处理（实验 1），但在面部倒置时没有（实验 2），随着年龄的增长，反应准确性提高，而反应准确性与蒙面人脸的接触程度无关。这些结果表明，整体面部处理在幼儿期相对较强，并且短期暴露于部分可见面部不会对面部整体感知的幼儿产生负面影响。
