Children are sensitive to mutual information in intermediate-complexity face and nonface features

Abstract

Uncovering when children learn to use specific visual information for recognizingobject categories is essential for understanding how experience shapes recognition.Research on the development of face recognition has focused on children’s use oflow-level information (e.g. orientation sub-bands), or on children's use of high-levelinformation, namely, configural or holistic information. Do children also useintermediate complexity features for categorizing faces and objects, and if so, atwhat age? Intermediate-complexity features bridge the gap between low- and high- level processing: they have computational benefits for object detection and segmentation, and are known to drive neural responses in the ventral visual system.Here, we asked when children develop sensitivity to diagnostic category information in intermediate-complexity features. We presented children (5-10 years old) and adults with image fragments of faces (Experiment 1) and cars (Experiment 2) varying in their mutual information, which quantities a fragment's diagnosticity of a specific category. Our goal was to determine whether children were sensitive to the amount of mutual information in these fragments, and if their information usage is different from adults’. We found that despite better overall categorization performance in adults, all children were sensitive to fragment diagnosticity in both categories, suggesting that intermediate representations of appearance are established early in childhood. Moreover, children's usage of mutual information was not limited to face fragments, suggesting the extracting intermediate complexity features is a process that is not specific only to faces. We discuss the implications of our findings for developmental theories of face and object recognition.

Configural properties of face portraits change between childhood and adulthood

“…We suggest that our production data offers an interesting perspective on these data (and related studies) regarding the perceptual units we should consider when evaluating sensitivity to face configuration or manipulating face geometry. Specifically, our results suggest that considering the eyes and nose to be one unit may be a more appropriate choice than considering all discrete facial features to be constituent pieces of the larger face pattern, which we note is consistent with recent developmental results motivated by computational studies designed to determine which fragments of face patterns are most diagnostic (Balas et al, 2020). Our data thus reveal specific patterns of face configuration errors that persist throughout middle childhood and may indicate particular aspects of facial appearance (joint representation of the eyes and nose) that are more robust early in development.…”

Grass and gravel: Investigating visual properties preschool children and adults use when distinguishing naturalistic images

“…This suggests that preschool children have detected-and flexibly integrated-task-relevant visual information in accordance with their visual processing capacities. This finding is important, because in complex naturalistic stimuli, visual hierarchies are more fluent and ambiguous than in the graphically structured stimuli of common global-local paradigms (Kimchi, 2015), so that the current findings add to the sparse developmental literature investigating local-global processing with naturalistic stimuli (e.g., Balas, Auen, Saville, et al, 2020;Balas, Auen, Thrash, et al, 2020).…”

Visual experience is not necessary for the development of face-selectivity in the lateral fusiform gyrus

“…Although these later changes could in principle reflect either experience or biological maturation or both, some evidence indicates that the amount (Balas et al, 2019(Balas et al, , 2018 and kind (Gilchrist and McKone, 2003;McKone and Boyer, 2006) of face experience during childhood affects face perception abilities in adulthood. In all of these cases, however, it is not clear whether visual experience plays an instructive role in wiring up or refining the circuits for face perception, or a permissive role in maintaining those circuits (Crair, 1999).…”