Face and body recognition show similar improvement during childhood

•Face recognition skills develop slowly during childhood.•Bodies convey identity cues and may be processed by similar mechanisms to faces.•We asked whether face and body recognition show similar improvement during childhood.•We found that they did.•The mechanisms underlying the improvement may be co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental child psychology 2015-09, Vol.137, p.1-11
Main Authors: Bank, Samantha, Rhodes, Gillian, Read, Ainsley, Jeffery, Linda
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Body recognition
Child
Child development
Child Development - physiology
Child psychology
Childhood
Development
Face
Face perception
Face recognition
Facial Recognition - physiology
Female
Human Body
Humans
Identity
Male
Middle Aged
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:•Face recognition skills develop slowly during childhood.•Bodies convey identity cues and may be processed by similar mechanisms to faces.•We asked whether face and body recognition show similar improvement during childhood.•We found that they did.•The mechanisms underlying the improvement may be common or mature at the same rate. Adults are proficient in extracting identity cues from faces. This proficiency develops slowly during childhood, with performance not reaching adult levels until adolescence. Bodies are similar to faces in that they convey identity cues and rely on specialized perceptual mechanisms. However, it is currently unclear whether body recognition mirrors the slow development of face recognition during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that body recognition develops faster than face recognition. Here we measured body and face recognition in 6- and 10-year-old children and adults to determine whether these two skills show different amounts of improvement during childhood. We found no evidence that they do. Face and body recognition showed similar improvement with age, and children, like adults, were better at recognizing faces than bodies. These results suggest that the mechanisms of face and body memory mature at a similar rate or that improvement of more general cognitive and perceptual skills underlies improvement of both face and body recognition.
ISSN:0022-0965
1096-0457
DOI:10.1016/j.jecp.2015.02.011