Starting School Improves Preschoolers' Ability to Discriminate Child Faces

Abstract

Children take many years to become as skilled as adults in differentiating among faces and there is debate about the role of face experience in improving their skills. Here we tested whether the increase in exposure to the faces of children associated with entering school leads to improved face discrimination for this face category. To do so, we compared the face discrimination abilities of 3- to 4-year-old children who began attending school for the first time with those of age-matched controls not yet in school. Both groups completed a 2-alternative forced-choice matching task with adult and child faces, presented both in an upright and inverted orientation, at Time 1 (within the first month of entering school for the school group) and at Time 2 (5 months later). Between Time 1 and Time 2, both groups improved in discriminating between adult faces, but only the preschoolers improved for child faces. These effects were not modulated by inversion. Overall, these results suggest that, during the preschool years, a natural increase in exposure to the faces of 1 face category leads to improved discrimination of novel exemplars of this face category.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Herb Pick taught us to carefully observe the environment in order to spot information to which children are exposed that might lead to changes in their perception. The results presented here are an example of the value of that lesson. Preliminary data from this project served as the undergraduate honors thesis for Ana Bracovic and were presented at the 2012 meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. We thank Nimasha Weliwitigoda for helping to create the stimuli and the testing board.

FUNDING

This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to Daphne Maurer (9797). Adélaïde de Heering was funded by NSERC.

Notes

¹ The results were identical when the data of these participants were included in the analyses.

² A preliminary version of the questionnaire was also administered at Time 1.