The Developmental Trajectory Of Face Holistic Processing In Preschool Children

Faces are everyday objects processed with perceptual expertise,which has its specialized cognitive and neural mechanisms.Holistic processing,as one of the most crucial features of perceptual expertise,enables people to view a face as a whole,instead of a simple collection of its distinct parts.Empirically,holistic face processing is mainly supported by the evidence from the inversion effect and the composite effect.Face perceptual expertise develops since early childhood,and keeps on growing until adolescence when it reaches a relatively stable and adult-like stage.Therefore,in order to unveil the key questions underlying holistic processing(e.g.mechanisms and landmarks),it’s pivotal to study how such processing develops across life span.Research on how kids develop holistic processing has been ample among Western populations.Literature suggests that during face processing children have been found with an inversion effect as early as 3-year-old and with a composite effect as early as3.5 years old.Also,face processing has been found different between Western and Eastern populations: the effect of holistic processing could be more robust among Easterners compared with that among Westerners.Despite that the development of holistic processing has been studied among western populations,it remains unclear how such development may apply to Eastern populations,especially Eastern children(such as preschoolers).Therefore,the study aimed at investigating how Chinese preschoolers develop their capacity of holistic processing.We investigated both inversion effect(Experiment 1)and composite effect(Experiment 2)to study the developmental trajectory of holistic processing among four age groups,young preschoolers(mean age: 3.8y),middle preschoolers(mean age: 4.7y),old preschoolers(mean age: 5.8y),and young adults(mean age: 21.1y).For both experiments,we presented participants with simultaneous and sequential presentation paradigms.Results were provided below.(1)As for the findings related to inversion effect,among all groups,the performance of face recognition was more accurate in the upright condition than that in the inverted condition,whereas the performance of cars recognition did not differ between conditions.The results may support that the face inversion effect can be found in Chinese preschoolers between three to six years old.(2)According to the findings of the complete design of the composite paradigm,we found a significant interaction of Alignment × Congruency among the young preschoolers(with mean of 3.8y)in both the simultaneous and sequential presentation paradigms.The results may suggest that the composite face effect may be formalized as early as about 4 years old.(3)As for the findings regarding face inversion effect and composite effect,the performance of face recognition in old preschoolers was significantly higher than that in the middle and the young preschoolers,while the middle and the young age group did not differ.Results may indicate that face processing capacity might increase with age among preschoolers between 4 to 6 years old.(4)As for findings in regards to the face inversion effect,the holistic face processing reached an adult-like performance among the old preschoolers(but not the others)only in simultaneous presentation paradigms(but not in sequential presentation paradigms).Results imply that how preschoolers process inverted faces may be affected by how faces appear temporarily(e.g.sequentially or spontaneously).To conclude,the study supported the existence of the face inversion effect and composite effect among 3-year-old Chinese preschoolers.Additionally,we found the inversion effect among preschoolers between 3 to 6 years old but the composite effect only for 3 and 5-year-olds(not for 4-year-olds).The study unveils potentially different developmental patterns for face inversion effect and for composite effect among preschoolers.