Nine-year-old children use norm-based coding to visually represent
facial expression
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1
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australia
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2
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
i. Background
Children are less skilled than adults at judging facial expression; at age ten they still perform worse than adults in expression judgement tasks. It may be that at this age children have not yet developed adult-like mechanisms for visually representing faces. Adults are thought to represent faces in a multidimensional face-space, and have been shown to code the expression of a face relative to the norm or average face in face-space. Norm-based coding is economical and adaptive, and could explain why adults are more sensitive to facial expression than children. This study investigated the coding system that nine-year-old children use to represent facial expression.
ii. Methods
An adaptation aftereffect paradigm was used to test 24 adults and 18 children (9 years 2 months to 9 years 11 months old). Participants adapted to anti-expressions of varying extremity. They then judged the expression of an average expression. Adaptation creates an aftereffect that makes the test face look like the expression opposite that of the adaptor; if coding is norm-based, we expect larger aftereffects for more extreme adaptors.
iii. Results
Consistent with the predictions of norm-based coding, aftereffects were larger for more extreme adaptors in both the child and adult groups.
iv. Discussion
Results indicate that, like adults, children's coding of facial expressions is norm-based by nine years of age. This is consistent with other recent findings suggesting that qualitatively adult-like face processing mechanisms develop earlier in childhood than was previously thought.
Acknowledgements
We thank the school staff, students, and parents who participated in this study. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Cognition and Its Disorders (Project CE110001021) and an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship to Gillian Rhodes (Project DP0877379). The work was also supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-000-22-4319 awarded to Christopher P. Benton.
Keywords:
face perception,
Expression,
Children,
development,
adaptation
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Oral
Topic:
Sensation and Perception
Citation:
Burton
N,
Jeffery
L,
Skinner
A,
Benton
CP and
Rhodes
G
(2013). Nine-year-old children use norm-based coding to visually represent
facial expression.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00171
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Received:
15 Oct 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Nichola Burton, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Perth, Australia, burton01@student.uwa.edu.au