The human face provides a wealth of information pertaining to the internal state and life-stage history of an individual. Facial width-to-height ratio is a size-independent sexually dimorphic trait, and estimates of aggression made by untrained adults judging own-race faces were positively associated with both facial width-to-height ratio and actual aggressive behavior. Given the significant adaptive value of accurately detecting aggressiveness based on facial appearance, we hypothesized that aggression estimates made by adults and 8-year-olds would be highly correlated with male facial width-to-height ratio even for a face category with which they had minimal experience—other-race faces. For each of the four race and age groups, estimates of aggression were positively correlated with facial width-to-height ratio irrespective of rating own-or other-race faces. Overall, the correlations between facial width-to-height ratio and ratings of aggression were stronger for adults than for children. Sensitivity to facial width-to-height ratio appears to be part of an evolved mechanism designed to detect threats in the external environment. This mechanism is likely broadly tuned and functions independently of experience.

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Past studies examining the other-age effect, the phenomenon in which own-age faces are recognized more accurately than other-age faces, are limited in number and report inconsistent results. Here we examine whether the perceptual system is preferentially tuned to differences among young adult faces. In experiment 1 young (18-25 years) and older adult (63-87 years) participants were shown young and older face pairs in which one member of each pair was undistorted and the other had compressed or expanded features. Participants indicated which member of each pair was more normal and which was more expanded. Both age groups were more accurate when tested with young compared with older faces-but only when judging normality. In experiment 2 we tested a separate group of young adults on the same two tasks but with upright and inverted face pairs to examine the differential pattern of results between the normality and discrimination tasks. Inversion impaired performance on the normality task but not the discrimination task and eliminated the young adult advantage in the normality task. Collectively, these results suggest that the face processing system is optimized for young adult faces and that abundant experience with older faces later in life does not reverse this perceptual tuning.

Adults' expertise in face recognition has been attributed to norm-based coding. Moreover, adults possess separable norms for a variety of face categories (e.g., race, sex, age) that appear to enhance recognition by reducing redundancy in the information shared by faces and ensuring that only relevant dimensions are used to encode faces from a given category. Although 5-year-old children process own-race faces using norm-based coding, little is known about the organization and refinement of their face space. The current study investigated whether 5-year-olds rely on category-specific norms and whether experience facilitates the development of dissociable face prototypes. In Experiment 1, we examined whether Chinese 5-year-olds show race-contingent opposing aftereffects and the extent to which aftereffects transfer across face race among Caucasian and Chinese 5-year-olds. Both participant races showed partial transfer of aftereffects across face race; however, there was no evidence for race-contingent opposing aftereffects. To examine whether experience facilitates the development of category-specific prototypes, we investigated whether race-contingent aftereffects are present among Caucasian 5-year-olds with abundant exposure to Chinese faces (Experiment 2) and then tested separate groups of 5-year-olds with two other categories with which they have considerable experience: sex (male/female faces) and age (adult/child faces) (Experiment 3). Across all three categories, 5-year-olds showed no category-contingent opposing aftereffects. These results demonstrate that 5 years of age is a stage characterized by minimal separation in the norms and associated coding dimensions used for faces from different categories and suggest that refinement of the mechanisms that underlie expert face processing occurs throughout childhood.

Extensive behavioral evidence shows that our internal representation of faces, or face prototype, can be dynamically updated by immediate experience. This is illustrated by the robust attractiveness aftereffect phenomenon whereby originally unattractive faces become attractive after we are exposed to a set of unattractive faces. Although behavioral evidence suggests this effect to have a strong neural basis, limited neuroimaging evidence exists. Here we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy methodology (fNIRS) to bridge this gap. During the pre-adaptation trials, participants judged the attractiveness of three sets of faces: normal/undistorted faces, compressed faces (the internal features and distances between them were compressed), and expanded faces (the internal features and distances between them were stretched). Then, participants were shown extremely compressed faces for 5 minutes as adaptation stimuli, after which participants judged the same three sets of faces in post-adaptation trials. Behaviorally, after the adaptation trials, participants rated the compressed faces more attractive whereas they judged the other two sets of faces as less attractive, replicating the robust adaptation effect. fNIRS results showed that short-term exposure to compressed faces led to significant decreases in neural activity to all face types, but in a more extended network of cortical regions in the frontal and occipital cortexes for undistorted faces. Taken together, these findings suggest that the face attractiveness aftereffect mainly reflects changes in the neural representation of the face prototype in response to recent exposures to new face exemplars.