Visual Experience Effect On The Face Recognition Ability: A Developmental And A Training Study

Adults are face experts, they can recognize thousands of faces at the very specific level. However,people are not born with expertise. Researchers had focused on the acquisition of perceptualexpertise in adults and developmental populations for many years, and proposed that visualexperience shaped the perceptual ability beginning early in development and throughout thelifespan. Thus, visual experience could be the root cause of face expertise. During the acquisitionof perceptual expertise, people also learned using holistic processing strategy to recognize faces.For better understanding of how visual experience effect on face recognition ability, we designedtwo empirical studies. In Study1，we used the basic developmental paradigm to investigate thedevelopment of recognition ability and holistic processing ability of own-race faces. Werecruited primary school students (7years old,9years old,11years old) and adults (≥20yearsold) to take part in the Old/new immediate memory task and part-whole task for faces. We alsoset up the Old/new immediate memory task for cars as the non-faces control task. The resultsrevealed that,(1) Adults had better recognition performance than children,(2) Non-facesrecognition task didn’t show the same pattern,(3) The development of holistic processing abilitycouldn’t predict the development of face recognition ability.Considering the development progress mixed the influence of maturity and experience, in study2we used the “pre-test training post-test” paradigm to manipulate the visual experienceindependently. In the two-week training program, Chinese adults contacted a large number ofCaucasian faces photos. We investigated their improvement of face recognition ability andholistic processing ability for Caucasian faces. The results revealed that,(1) Adults had asignificant improvement on Caucasian face recognition task,(2) Adults had a significantimprovement on holistic processing task,(3) The holistic processing had an effect on facerecognition ability.According to these two studies, we propose that the accumulation of visual experience is the rootcause of face expertise. During the acquisition of face expertise, people master the use of holistic processing. The present study provided important information in understanding the mechanismof the acquisition of face expertise.