Factors influencing young children’s ability to discriminate unfamiliar faces by age

Abstract

Three experiments examined young children’s ability to discriminate between pairs of unfamiliar faces which differed in age. Apre-test found that 99% of 6-year-olds, but only 36%of 4-year-olds, could reliably decide which of two faces was the oldest. Experiment 1 attempted to identify the nature of the information used for age-processing faces. Face-pairs were presented in four different versions: Original (unmodified image); Features-only (containing only the internal face features); Skin-blur (in which the skin regions of the face were subjected to Gaussian blurring); or Overall-blur (in which the entire image was blurred). The last three versions selectively reduced specific cues to age. No significant differences in age-discrimination performance were found between these different versions, suggesting that, as with adults, children are capable of adaptively using a variety of cues in order to discriminate between faces on the basis of age. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated in more detail a phenomenon suggested by Experiment 1: That children found it easier to discriminate between faces by age that were similar in age to themselves, than between adult faces. The results suggest that children as young as 6 years can use age to discriminate between faces of all ages with a relatively high degree of accuracy, but experience most difficulty with adult faces.