How do children learn to be face-recognition ‘specialists’?

During the first year of life, infants seem to lose the ability to tell the difference between faces they see frequently (i.e.: primary caregivers) and less frequently (i.e.: animal faces). This study asks: How do children develop the ability to recognize faces, and how might being exposed to one face type more than another affect children’s face processing abilities?

In this experiment, children play a face-matching game using human and monkey faces. On each turn, they see one face to remember. They then see two faces: the old one and a new one. Their job is to pick the face they have seen before.

During the game, children see human and monkey faces oriented right-side up or upside-down. Research shows that upside-down faces are harder to recognize- especially if they belong to a face type we are already accustomed to seeing. By playing the game with different face types and orientations, we can learn how prior exposure to a face affects face perception.

We predict turning monkey faces upside-down will not make the game harder for children, but turning human faces upside-down will. This would indicate that children become ‘specialists’ for human faces as they grow older, learning detailed strategies to recognize people successfully. Understanding how this happens in typical children may also help us figure out whether face recognition is different in children with disorders like autism.

View Dr. Meg Moulson's podcast about this research.

Listen to Dr. Ben Balas discuss this research.

Learn about other research related to Children's Social Reasoning.

This research is conducted by the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at Children's Hospital Boston