Abstract
Recent research (e.g., Balas & Saville, 2015) has demonstrated that individuals from small communities show impoverished face recognition relative to those from large communities, suggesting that the number of faces to which one is exposed may have a measurable effect on face processing abilities. In the present study, we sought to extend these findings by examining a second factor that influences the population of faces to which one is exposed during childhood: educational setting. In particular, we examined whether participants who were homeschooled (n = 22) show reduced performance relative to non-homeschoolers (n = 26) on two measures used to characterize face recognition ability: the Cambridge Face Memory Test (Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006) and an identity sorting task (Jenkins et al., 2011) in which participants sort 40 photographs of two unfamiliar identities (20 photographs/model) into the number of identities they believe are present. On the CFMT, there was no effect of educational setting, p = .82; however, on the sorting task, participants who were homeschooled showed significant deficits. Relative to non-homeschoolers, participants who were homeschooled perceived more identities, p = .03, and showed reduced discriminability, p = .007, when forming identity-specific piles in the sorting task. Such results suggest that reduced exposure to faces early in life as a function of homeschooling may have lasting effects on the face processing system, particularly with regard to perceptions of within-person variability.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017