Robust holistic face processing in early childhood during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The timing of the developmental emergence of holistic face processing and its sensitivity to experience in early childhood are somewhat controversial topics. To investigate holistic face perception in early childhood, we used an online testing platform and administered a two-alternative forced-choice task to 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. The children saw pairs of composite faces and needed to decide whether the faces were the same or different. To determine whether experience with masked faces may have negatively affected holistic processing, we also administered a parental questionnaire to assess the children's exposure to masked faces during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that all three age groups performed holistic face processing when the faces were upright (Experiment 1) but not when the faces were inverted (Experiment 2), that response accuracy increased with age, and that response accuracy was not related to degree of exposure to masked faces. These results indicate that holistic face processing is relatively robust in early childhood and that short-term exposure to partially visible faces does not negatively affect young children's holistic face perception.

Keywords: Composite face effect; Early childhood; Experience; Face recognition; Online Testing; Perception.

Fig. 1

Stimuli presented in Experiments 1 and 2. (A) Cartoonized example of how face identity pairs were combined to make different composite faces. On a given test trial, participants saw composite faces presented on the left and right sides of the screen according to 4 different conditions: aligned-same, misaligned-same, aligned-different, and misaligned-different. (B) Example of a stimulus trial in Experiment 1. (C) Example of a stimulus trial in Experiment 2.

Fig. 2

Accuracy in the aligned-same and misaligned-same trials as a function of age in Experiment 1 (upright faces). Asterisks denote Bonferroni-corrected significant differences (*** p < .001, * p < .05) and error bars represent standard errors of the mean.

Fig. 3

Accuracy on the aligned-same and misaligned-same trials as a function of age in Experiment 2 (inverted faces). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Fig. 4

Accuracy in the aligned-same and misaligned-same trials for upright vs. inverted composite faces in the children who participated in both Experiments 1 and 2. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean. ** p < .01.