Abstract
The face-specificity hypothesis states that the temporal cortex responds specifically to facial stimuli. Evidence for the face-specificity hypothesis first came from the face inversion effect, a phenomenon whereby people demonstrate worse performance for the identification of inverted faces compared to upright faces. However, this inversion effect has also been demonstrated for non-face objects such as bodies (Reed et al., 2003; Tao & Sun, 2013; Tao et al, 2014, 2020). These findings led to the expertise hypothesis, which suggests that there are dedicated neural regions involved in processing objects with high within-class similarity and extensive exposure. Facial processing mostly develops during childhood (Mondloch et al., 2003). Very few studies have explored the holistic processing of body posture during childhood. Some studies have found that body representation develops later than face representation (Heron & Slaughter, 2008; Slaughter et al., 2002), while other findings suggested that at least a smattering of body perceptual expertise develops at as early as 9 months of age (Hock et al., 2016; Zieber et al., 2010). Thus, in the present study, we sought to explore the holistic processing of body posture in 4-5 year-old preschool children. We used a same/different judgement task for body postures (Tao & Sun, 2013). Four-year-old (N=29) and five-year-old children (N=31) were asked to judge whether the two successive body postures (either both upright or both inverted) were same or not. Both accuracy and reaction time showed the significant main effects of orientation, with upright body postures exhibiting higher accuracy and faster RTs than inverted ones. While the main effects of age and the interactions between orientation and age were not significant. These results suggest that holistic processing is not unique to faces, and that the development of perceptual expertise for body posture start before 4-year-olds.