The composite task reveals stronger holistic processing in children than adults for child faces
Date
2009
Authors
Susilo, Bagus (Tirta)
Crookes, Kate
McKone, Elinor
Turner, Hannah
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Public Library of Science
Abstract
Background: While own-age faces have been reported to be better recognized than other-age faces, the underlying cause of this phenomenon remains unclear. One potential cause is holistic face processing, a special kind of perceptual and cognitive processing reserved for perceiving upright faces. Previous studies have indeed found that adults show stronger holistic processing when looking at adult faces compared to child faces, but whether a similar own-age bias exists in children remains to be shown. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we used the composite face task - a standard test of holistic face processing - to investigate if, for child faces, holistic processing is stronger for children than adults. Results showed child participants (8-13 years) had a larger composite effect than adult participants (22-65 years). Conclusions/Significance: Our finding suggests that differences in strength of holistic processing may underlie the own-age bias on recognition memory. We discuss the origin of own-age biases in terms of relative experience, face-space tuning, and social categorization.
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Keywords: accuracy; adolescent; adult; age distribution; aged; article; Caucasian; child; cognition; controlled study; face; female; human; human experiment; image processing; male; memory; mental task; normal human; perception; recognition; sex difference; task pe
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PLOS ONE (Public Library of Science)
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Journal article
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2037-12-31
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