Department of Special Education, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel.
Department of Special Education, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel; Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2024 Sep;245:105964. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.105964. Epub 2024 May 31.
Face recognition shows a long trajectory of development and is known to be closely associated with the development of social skills. However, it is still debated whether this long trajectory is perceptually based and what the role is of experience-based refinements of face representations throughout development. We examined the effects of short and long-term experienced stimulus history on face processing, using regression biases of face representations towards the experienced mean. Children and adults performed same-different judgments in a serial discrimination task where two consecutive faces were drawn from a distribution of morphed faces. The results show that face recognition continues to improve after 9 years of age, with more pronounced improvements for own-race faces. This increased narrowing with age is also indicated by similar use of stimulus statistics for own-race and other-race faces in children, contrary to the different use of the overall stimulus history for these two face types in adults. Increased face proficiency in adulthood renders the perceptual system less tuned to other-race face statistics. Altogether, the results demonstrate associations between levels of specialization and the extent to which perceptual representations become narrowly tuned with age.
人脸识别显示出很长的发展轨迹，并且被认为与社交技能的发展密切相关。然而，人们仍在争论这种长轨迹是否基于感知，以及在整个发展过程中，基于经验的面部表示的修正作用是什么。我们使用面部表示向经验均值的回归偏差，检查了短期和长期经验刺激历史对面部处理的影响。儿童和成年人在一个连续判别任务中进行了相同-不同的判断，其中两个连续的面孔是从变形面孔的分布中绘制出来的。结果表明，面部识别在 9 岁以后仍在不断提高，而对本族面孔的提高更为明显。这种随年龄增长而变窄的趋势也表明，儿童对本族和异族面孔的刺激统计数据的使用相似，而成年人对这两种面孔类型的整体刺激历史的使用则不同。成年后面部熟练度的提高使得感知系统对异族面孔的统计数据不那么敏感。总的来说，这些结果表明专业化程度与感知表示随年龄变得越来越窄之间存在关联。
