Developmental changes in the recognition of faces and facial features

The view that, as children get older, there is a decline in the use of feat ure-based forms of face processing to more configurational forms of process ing was examined by asking 6-year-old and 9-year-old children to judge whic h of two photographs matches an identical probe photograph. The probe and t est stimuli were either photographs of whole faces or photographs of isolat ed facial features. Within this standard method, the stimuli also systemati cally varied in terms of the familiarity of the faces shown and in the orie ntation of presentation, both factors that have been interpreted as effecti ng configurational encoding. A number of age-related, effects are observed: (a) older children are better at recognizing whole faces than younger chil dren, (b) older children exhibit a clear face inversion effect with whole f aces while the younger children are equally adept at identifying upright an d inverted whole faces, and (c) analysis of the recognition rates associate d with the individual features reveals that younger children are better tha n older children when asked to recognize eye regions. It is argued that the data support the view that as children get older there is a change in the forms of piecemeal encoding employed and an increase in configurational pro cessing. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.