July 2013
Volume 13, Issue 9
Free
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   July 2013
The nature of 5-year-old children’s holistic face processing: Evidence from eye-gaze contingency
Author Affiliations
  • Goedele Van Belle
    Face Categorisation Lab, University of Louvain, Belgium
  • Jutta Billino
    Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Giessen, Germany
  • Bruno Rossion
    Face Categorisation Lab, University of Louvain, Belgium
  • Gudrun Schwarzer
    Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Giessen, Germany
Journal of Vision July 2013, Vol.13, 95. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/13.9.95
  • Views
  • Share
  • Tools
    • Alerts
      ×
      This feature is available to authenticated users only.
      Sign In or Create an Account ×
    • Get Citation

      Goedele Van Belle, Jutta Billino, Bruno Rossion, Gudrun Schwarzer; The nature of 5-year-old children’s holistic face processing: Evidence from eye-gaze contingency. Journal of Vision 2013;13(9):95. https://doi.org/10.1167/13.9.95.

      Download citation file:


      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

      ×
  • Supplements
Abstract

Holistic processing of faces, the perception of facial parts as an integrated whole, is considered to be fundamental in adult face processing. Developmental studies suggest holistic processing to be already mature in 4-year-olds (de Heering, et al., 2007) and perhaps even in infants (Cashon & Cohen, 2001; Schwarzer et al., 2007). However, previous studies mainly investigated whether the position/context of single parts/face halves influences the perception of other parts/halves so that the current developmental evidence of holistic processing is rather indirect. Here we addressed this question by means of an eye-gaze contingency approach applied to face perception by Van Belle et al. (2010). Using a gaze-contingent window, we revealed only the fixated part of the face at a time, implying part based processing, while a mask forced participants to process the whole face by gaze-contingently occluding their fixated parts. We tested 25 5 years old children and 19 adults. In each trial, brief presentation of a target face was followed by the target and a distractor face, presented side-by-side and covered by a window or mask, or in full view. Participants had to indicate the target face. Despite an overall lower performance for children than adults, their performance pattern was very similar, with the highest accuracy in full view, and the lowest with the window (part-based) (adults: full=.97, mask= .94, window=.88; children: full=.84; mask=.79, window=.64) and similar results for correct RTs (adults: full=1148ms, mask=1291ms, window=2031ms; children: full=3279ms, mask=4718ms, window=6531ms). Overall, both mask and window decreased performance more for children than for adults suggesting that children’s face representation is less robust to reduced diagnostic information. However, in accuracy at least, the slight decrease of performance in the critical mask condition compared to full view did not differ between adults and children, suggesting mature holistic processing at 5 years of age.

Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013

×
×

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

Sign in or purchase a subscription to access this content. ×

You must be signed into an individual account to use this feature.

×