Face Recognition in Young Children: When the Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

Tanaka, James W.; Kay, Joshua B.; Grinnell, Eliza; Stansfield, R. Brent; Szechter, Lisa E.

doi:10.1080/713756795

Cited by 182 publications

(174 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Children's performance, like that of adults, was impaired by the inversion of emotions, as was that of adults. This observationmirrors that reported in the literature for face recognition, namely that when children's ability to process configural information is tested with the inversion or composite paradigm (or a similar paradigm), they exhibit a sensitivity to configural information that is similar to that ofadults despite differences in overall performance (Baenninger, 1994;Carey & Diamond, 1994;Flin, 1985;Freire& Lee, 2001;Tanaka et al, 1998). The conclusion from these data is that configural information does not play a crucial role in the development of face recognition ability.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…In the whole-part paradigm, participants need to recognize face features either embedded in the whole face stimulus or presented in isolation. A whole-part advantage effect (i.e., features are better recognized in the context of a normal face than when isolated) was reported in 4-and 6-year-olds, again of similar amplitude to older children (Pellicano& Rhodes, 2003;Tanaka et al, 1998). Such effects have also been demonstrated in infants.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…Moreover, they found no inversion effect (i.e., children were not impaired by presenting a face upside down), whereas such an effect is known to be strong in adults (Yin, 1969). The inversion effect is considered to demonstrate the weight of configural information; by modifying the relative position of features (e.g., the eyes are above the nose in an upright face, whereas they are below the nose in an upside-down face), inversion of a face interferes with configural processing .However, Carey and Diamond's (1977) hypothesis has been challenged by studies demonstrating that children under 10 years of age can process faces configurally (Baenninger, 1994;Carey & Diamond, 1994;Flin, 1985;Freire& Lee, 2001;Tanaka, Kay, Grinnell, StansWeld, &Szechter, 1998). Notably, an inversion effectwas reported at younger than 10 years of age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

Durand

Gallay

Seigneuric

et al. 2007

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

292

243

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The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural informationin this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adultsneeded to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participantsneeded to recognize the emotion displayed by the top half of an upright or upside-down face that was orwas not aligned with a bottom half that displayed another emotion. The results showed that the ability torecognize facial emotion develops with age, with a developmental course that depends on the emotion tobe recognized. Moreover, children at all ages and adults exhibited both an inversion effect and a compositeeffect, suggesting that children rely on configural information to recognize facial emotions.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

Durand

Gallay

Seigneuric

et al. 2007

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

292

243

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“…Due to difficulty in relating these concepts precisely to experimental stimuli [87,88] support for this model has been controversial [85,[89][90][91][92][93]. Despite these challenges, the notions of featural and configural processing remain attractive concepts in understanding variations in face processing performance among healthy and clinical populations.…”

Section: Developmental Models Of Normal Facial Identity Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autism and the development of face processing

Golarai

Grill-Spector

Reiss

2006

Clinical Neuroscience Research

158

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Autism is a pervasive developmental condition, characterized by impairments in non-verbal communication, social relationships and stereotypical patterns of behavior. A large body of evidence suggests that several aspects of face processing are impaired in autism, including anomalies in gaze processing, memory for facial identity and recognition of facial expressions of emotion. In search of neural markers of anomalous face processing in autism, much interest has focused on a network of brain regions that are implicated in social cognition and face processing. In this review, we will focus on three such regions, namely the STS for its role in processing gaze and facial movements, the FFA in face detection and identification and the amygdala in processing facial expressions of emotion. Much evidence suggests that a better understanding of the normal development of these specialized regions is essential for discovering the neural bases of face processing anomalies in autism. Thus, we will also examine the available literature on the normal development of face processing. Key unknowns in this research area are the neuro-developmental processes, the role of experience and the interactions among components of the face processing system in shaping each of the specialized regions for processing faces during normal development and in autism. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.

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“…Another potential criticism is that children do not appear to recognize faces holistically (as operationalized by Farah and Tanaka's part-whole paradigm) until at least the age of 6 (Tanaka, Kay, Grinnell, Stansfield & Szechter, 1998). Although the part-whole test is not the most direct way to assess the existence of configural or holistic processing (the advantage for wholes over parts alone has been observed for both novice and expert-level recognition of non-face objects including Greebles, cars, and cells Gauthier, personal communication), and a more direct test is Tanaka and Sengco's (1997) second-order configuration manipulation, the data could reflect a qualitative shift in the way children process faces.…”

Section: Subordinate Classification Accuracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Organization of face and object recognition in modular neural network models

1999

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There is strong evidence that face processing in the brain is localized. The double dissociation between prosopagnosia, a face recognition deficit occurring after brain damage, and visual object agnosia, difficulty recognizing other kinds of complex objects, indicates that face and non-face object recognition may be served by partially independent neural mechanisms. In this paper, we use computational models to show how the face processing specialization apparently underlying prosopagnosia and visual object agnosia could be attributed to (1) a relatively simple competitive selection mechanism that, during development, devotes neural resources to the tasks they are best at performing, (2) the developing infant's need to perform subordinate classification (identification) of faces early on, and (3) the infant's low visual acuity at birth. [361][362][363][364][365][366][367][368] in the mixtures of experts (ME) modeling paradigm, we provide a preliminary computational demonstration of how this theory accounts for the double dissociation between face and object processing. We present two feed-forward computational models of visual processing. In both models, the selection mechanism is a gating network that mediates a competition between modules attempting to classify input stimuli. In Model I, when the modules are simple unbiased classifiers, the competition is sufficient to achieve enough of a specialization that damaging one module impairs the model's face recognition more than its object recognition, and damaging the other module impairs the model's object recognition more than its face recognition. However, the model is not completely satisfactory because it requires a search of parameter space. With Model II, we explore biases that lead to more consistent specialization. We bias the modules by providing one with low spatial frequency information and the other with high spatial frequency information. In this case, when the model's task is subordinate classification of faces and superordinate classification of objects, the low spatial frequency network shows an even stronger specialization for faces. No other combination of tasks and inputs shows this strong specialization. We take these results as support for the idea that something resembling a face processing "module" could arise as a natural consequence of the infant's developmental environment without being innately specified. ᭧

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Face Recognition in Young Children: When the Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

Cited by 182 publications

References 16 publications

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

Autism and the development of face processing

Organization of face and object recognition in modular neural network models

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