ISSN : 1229-0718
This experiment was designed to evaluate the viability of two explanations for the development of face recognition shift from piecemeal to configurational encoding, and change in the ordering of feature salience. Two types of facial transformation, replacement and displacement of features, were assumed to tap relatively more piecemeal and relatively more configurational information, respectively. The features replaced or displaced in faces were the eyes, nose and mouth. Two groups of children and a group of adults were shown a series of faces, each of which was followed by a pair of faces comprising the target and a distracter face. The subjects' task was to discriminate the target faces from distracters with replaced or displaced features. The results provided no evidence in support of either of the explanations. Subjects from all three age groups responded to the two types of facial transformation in a similar fashion, and showed a comparable pattern of differential salience of facial features.