TALK: Childrens face aftereffects transfer across changes in viewpoint

Face recognition performance improves during childhood, not reaching adult levels until late adolescence. Likewise, face-sensitive brain regions to not appear fully mature until a similar age. Recognition of faces across changes in viewpoint appears particularly slow to develop, suggesting that children’s face representations are more view-specific than those of adults. We used face aftereffects to investigate whether children encode faces in a more view-specific way than adults. Using both the figural aftereffect (E1) and the identity aftereffect (E2) we showed that 8 year-old children’s aftereffects transferred across substantial changes in viewpoint. Indeed, there was a trend for greater transfer among children than adults. In adults, transfer of aftereffects across views has been argued to reflect the operation of neurons broadly tuned to a limited number of viewpoints and/or to the operation view-invariant neurons. Our results suggest that children’s neural coding of face viewpoint is similar to that of adults.

Presented by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders