Developmental Changes in the Representation of Faces

Abstract

Children from age 6 to 16 judged which of two photographs of unfamiliar faces showed the same person as an inspection photograph. Recognition accuracy improved markedly between ages 6 and 10 with little change thereafter. Six- and eight-year-old children were especially susceptible to error when certain disguises were provided, in both memory and simultaneous presentation conditions. In contrast, when the stimuli depicted familiar faces, six-year-old children made few errors and showed no susceptibility to confounding paraphernalia. We concluded that young children encode new faces in terms of striking, relatively isolated, features. By age 10 or 12 the adult capacity has emerged, enabling configurational representation of a face from very little exposure to it.