Antonella Pisacane

No own-age bias in 3-year-old children: More evidence for the role of early experience in building face-processing biases

This study aimed to investigate the presence of an own-age bias in young children who accumulated different amounts of early experience with child faces. Discrimination abilities for upright and inverted adult and child faces were tested using a delayed two-alternative, forced-choice matching-to-sample task in two groups of 3-year-old children, one composed of first-born children and the other composed of children who, from the time of their birth, had daily exposure to a child face through the presence of an older sibling in their home. Children without an older sibling were better at differentiating among adult faces than among child faces and showed an inversion effect that was selective for adult faces. Children with an older sibling were equally skilled at differentiating upright adult and child faces and showed inversion effects of comparable magnitude for both face types. Results support the notion that face representational space of younger children is tuned to adult faces and suggest that age biases during early childhood are dependent on the effects of early experience.

Natural Experience Modulates the Processing of Older Adult Faces in Young Adults and 3-Year-Old Children

Just like other face dimensions, age influences the way faces are processed by adults as well as by children. However, it remains unclear under what conditions exactly such influence occurs at both ages, in that there is some mixed evidence concerning the presence of a systematic processing advantage for peer faces (own-age bias) across the lifespan. Inconsistency in the results may stem from the fact that the individual’s face representation adapts to represent the most predominant age traits of the faces present in the environment, which is reflective of the individual’s specific living conditions and social experience. In the current study we investigated the processing of younger and older adult faces in two groups of adults (Experiment 1) and two groups of 3-year-old children (Experiment 2) who accumulated different amounts of experience with elderly people. Contact with elderly adults influenced the extent to which both adult and child participants showed greater discrimination abilities and stronger sensitivity to configural/featural cues in younger versus older adult faces, as measured by the size of the inversion effect. In children, the size of the inversion effect for older adult faces was also significantly correlated with the amount of contact with elderly people. These results show that, in both adults and children, visual experience with older adult faces can tune perceptual processing strategies to the point of abolishing the discrimination disadvantage that participants typically manifest for those faces in comparison to younger adult faces.

How race and age experiences shape young children's face processing abilities.

Despite recent advances in research on race and age biases, the question of how race and age experiences combine to affect young childrens face perception remains unexplored. To fill this gap, the current study tested two ethnicities of 3-year-old children using a combined cross-race/cross-age design. Caucasian children with and without older siblings and Mainland Chinese children without older siblings were tested for their ability to discriminate adult and child Caucasian faces as well as adult and child Asian faces in both upright and inverted orientations. Children of both ethnicities manifested an own-race bias, which was confined to adult faces, and an adult face bias, which was confined to own-race faces. Likewise, sibling experience affected Caucasian childrens processing of own-race child faces, but this effect did not generalize to other-race faces. Results suggest that race and age information are represented at the same hierarchical level in young childrens memory.

Early and later experience with one younger sibling affects face processing abilities of 6-year-old children

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the effects of experience on perceptual learning. To this end, we compared the effects of early (before age 3) and later (after age 5) experience with one younger sibling on 6-year-olds’ processing of adult and infant faces. Unlike children without siblings, those with a younger sibling were equally skilled at differentiating faces of the two ages and showed a generalized inversion effect for both face ages, irrespective of when exposure to the sibling face began. Results indicate that face representation retains flexibility in response to extensive exposure to one facial identity even after age 3, and perceptual learning engendered by early experience continues to affect face-processing skills at 6 years.