The development of face expertise: The role of race, distinctiveness and intentionality

Face perception and recognition is an area of much research across infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of integration across these areas in the past. As such, there is a need for a comprehensive review of this literature. When examined, a number of discrepancies in research findings across these areas can be identified. The current literature review and empirical investigation take a first step in reconciling discrepancies in the literature and make suggestions for future investigations to bring together these disparate areas. Five-year-old children, eight-year-old children, eleven-year-old children, and adults were tested under either incidental or intentional learning conditions for recognition of distinctive and typical ownand other-race faces. No differences were evident between the incidental and intentional learning conditions. However, evidence of a significant distinctiveness effect was found for all age groups. In addition, the cross-race effect was shown to be highly dependent on the distinctiveness of the faces. In fact, there was no evidence of a cross-race effect for the highly typical faces, while a reversal of the cross-race effect was found for the highly distinctive faces. In other words, for the highly distinctive faces, other-race faces were recognized more accurately than own-race faces, a contrast to previous research demonstrating more accurate recognition for own-race faces than other-race faces. The results from the current study suggest that the cross-race effect is more complex than previously thought and that distinctiveness is a powerful influence in face recognition across development.