M Picozzi

Do all kids look alike? Evidence for an other-age effect in adults

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be modulated by experience. Moreover, in each of the 3 experiments, differences in the magnitude of the observed face inversion effect for each age class of faces were taken to reflect a difference in the processing strategies used to recognize the faces of each age. Evidence from Experiment 3 indicates that these strategies can be tuned by experience. The data are discussed with reference to an experience-based framework for face recognition.

Holistic processing for faces and cars in preschool-aged children and adults: Evidence from the composite effect

The current study compared the development of holistic processing for faces and non-face visual objects by testing for the composite effect for faces and frontal images of cars in 3- to 5-year-old children and adults in a series of four experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task. Results showed that a composite effect for faces was present as early as 3 1/2 years, and none of the age groups tested showed signs of a composite effect for cars. These findings provide the first demonstration that holistic processing is already selective for faces in early childhood, and confirm existing evidence that sensitivity to holistic information in faces does not increase from 4 years to adulthood.

Natural experience acquired in adulthood enhances holistic processing of other-age faces

Adults have been shown to perform better when recognizing adult faces in comparison to their performance when recognizing faces of different ages, resulting in an other-age effect (OAE) that resembles the well-known other-race effect (ORE). Both the OAE and ORE have been proposed to be experience dependent. In the current study, we used the composite-face paradigm with adult- and child-face stimuli to test holistic processing abilities of two groups of participants, a group of child novices and a group of preschool teachers. Our results demonstrate that novices do engage in holistic processing with both child and adult faces. However, the data also show that, for child faces, teachers used holistic processing to a greater extent than do novices. Moreover, teachers also engaged in holistic processing to a greater extent with child faces than with adult faces. These data suggest that experience likely plays a critical role in tuning holistic processing strategies towards specific types of faces.