Experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing. In the study reported here, we investigated how faces observed within the visual environment affect the development of the face-processing system during the 1st year of life. We assessed 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants' ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group and within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese). The 3-month-old infants demonstrated recognition in all conditions, the 6-month-old infants were able to recognize Caucasian and Chinese faces only, and the 9-month-old infants' recognition was restricted to own-race faces. The pattern of preferences indicates that the other-race effect is emerging by 6 months of age and is present at 9 months of age. The findings suggest that facial input from the infant's visual environment is crucial for shaping the face-processing system early in infancy, resulting in differential recognition accuracy for faces of different races in adulthood.Human adults are experts at recognizing faces of conspecifics and appear to perform this task effortlessly. Despite this impressive ability, however, adults are more susceptible to recognition errors when a target face is from an unfamiliar racial group, rather than their own racial group. This phenomenon is known as the other-race effect (ORE; see Meissner & Brigham, 2001, for a review). Although the ORE has been widely reported, the exact mechanisms that underlie reduced recognition accuracy for other-race faces, and precisely when this effect emerges during development, remain unclear.The ORE can be explained in terms of a modifiable face representation. The concept of a multidimensional face-space architecture, first proposed by Valentine (1991), has received much empirical support. According to the norm-based coding model, individual face exemplars are represented as vectors within face-space according to their deviation from a prototypical average. The prototype held by each person represents the average of all faces that person has ever encoded and is therefore unique. Although it is unclear which dimensions are most salient and used for recognition, it is likely that dimensions vary between individuals and possibly within each person over time. The prototype (and therefore

The relation between children’s lie-telling and their social and cognitive development was examined. Children (3 - 8 years) were told not to peek at a toy. Most children peeked and later lied about peeking. Children’s subsequent verbal statements were not always consistent with their initial denial and leaked critical information revealing their deceit. Children’s conceptual moral understanding of lies, executive functioning, and theory-of-mind understanding were also assessed. Children’s initial false denials were related to their first-order belief understanding and their inhibitory control. Children’s ability to maintain their lies was related to their second-order belief understanding. Children’s lying was related to their moral evaluations. These finding suggest that social and cognitive factors may play an important role in children’s lie-telling abilities.

Adults are sensitive to the physical differences that define ethnic groups. However, the age at which we become sensitive to ethnic differences is currently unclear. Our study aimed to clarify this by testing newborns and young infants for sensitivity to ethnicity using a visual preference (VP) paradigm. While newborn infants demonstrated no spontaneous preference for faces from either their own- or other-ethnic groups, 3-month-old infants demonstrated a significant preference for faces from their own-ethnic group. These results suggest that preferential selectivity based on ethnic differences is not present in the first days of life, but is learned within the first 3 months of life. The findings imply that adults' perceptions of ethnic differences are learned and derived from differences in exposure to own- versus other-race faces during early development.

Preschoolers' theory-of-mind development follows a similar age trajectory across many cultures. To determine whether these similarities are related to similar underlying ontogenetic processes, we examined whether the relation between theory of mind and executive function commonly found among U.S. preschoolers is also present among Chinese preschoolers. Preschoolers from Beijing, China (N = 109), were administered theory-of-mind and executive-functioning tasks, and their performance was compared with that of a previously studied sample of U.S. preschoolers (N = 107). The Chinese preschoolers out-performed their U.S. counterparts on all measures of executive functioning, but were not similarly advanced in theory-of-mind reasoning. Nonetheless, individual differences in executive functioning predicted theory of mind for children in both cultures. Thus, the relation between executive functioning and theory of mind is robust across two disparate cultures. These findings shed light on why executive functioning is important for theoryof-mind development.Over the preschool years, children's understanding of their own and other individuals' mental states-that is, their theory of mind-goes though an important transition that is often indexed by their emerging understanding of false belief (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Recent findings show considerable cross-cultural synchrony in the age at which children gain facility with false-belief reasoning (Callaghan et al., 2005). It is not clear, however, whether this cross-cultural developmental synchrony can be attributed to universal developmental processes.Within Western cultures, several factors have been shown to affect the developmental timetable of false-belief and related theory-of-mind concepts. One factor believed to be particularly important is executive functioning (Carlson & Moses, 2001;Moses, 2001;Perner & Lang, 1999). Several studies of Western children have shown that their performance on false-belief and other theory-of-mind tasks can be predicted from tasks that tap executive-functioning skills such as response inhibition, cognitive conflict resolution, and working memory (Carlson, Moses, & Hix, 1998;Davis & Pratt, 1995;Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995;Hughes, 1998;Perner & Lang, 2000). These relations typically persist even when factors such as age and verbal ability are controlled. To begin to assess whether this Copyright © 2006 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript developmental pathway might be universal, we examined whether the relation between executive function and theory of mind also holds in children from Beijing, China.This population is of theoretical interest because there are reasons to believe that Chinese preschoolers may show more mature patterns of executive functioning than U.S. preschoolers. First, cultural psychologists have noted that Chinese parents expect children as young as 2 years old to master impulse control, whereas U.S. parents do not expect such mastery until the preschool years (Chen...

We report four experiments leading to conclusions that: (i) the face-inversion effect is mainly due to the deficits in processing of configural information from inverted faces; and (ii) this effect occurs primarily at the encoding stage of face processing, rather than at the storage stage. In experiment 1, participants discriminated upright faces differing primarily in configuration with 81% accuracy. Participants viewing the same faces presented upside down scored only 55%. In experiment 2, the corresponding discrimination rates for faces differing mainly in featural information were 91% (upright) and 90% (inverted). In experiments 3 and 4, the same faces were used in a memory paradigm. In experiment 3, a delayed matching-to-sample task was used, in which upright-face pairs differed either in configuration or features. Recognition rates were comparable to those for the corresponding upright faces in the discrimination tasks in experiments 1 and 2. However, there was no effect of delay (1 s, 5 s, or 10 s). In experiment 4, we repeated experiment 3, this time with inverted faces. Results were comparable to those of inverted conditions in experiments 1 and 2, and again there was no effect of delay. Together these results suggest that an 'encoding bottleneck' for configural information may be responsible for the face-inversion effect in particular, and memory for faces in general.