Development of Face Processing Expertise

描述（由申请人提供）：我们提出了一套从婴儿期到青春期面部专业知识习得的发展研究。一个国际研究团队将显著推进我们正在进行的研究项目（R01 HD046526: 2004-2010），以调查儿童在其独特环境中的经验如何调整面部专业知识的获取。我们将使用两种研究策略来建立经验与面部专业知识获取之间的联系。首先，我们将以几个国家的婴儿和儿童为样本，利用他们对不同种族、性别、年龄和物种的面孔自然产生的经验差异。其次，我们利用一个训练范式，实验性地诱导婴儿和儿童对不同类别面孔的不同体验。与使用静态面部样本的传统面部处理研究不同，我们将使用更自然的动态面部刺激来测试参与者。该方法应提供婴儿和儿童提取面部特征属性（如种族、性别、年龄、物种和身份）的能力的敏感测量。我们将同时研究儿童对不同种族、性别、年龄和物种的面孔的识别和分类。我们将测试一个普遍的假设，即虽然人类的视觉系统可能在出生时偏爱类似人脸的刺激，但我们的大部分面部处理能力是在发育过程中通过成千上万张面孔的经验获得的。不同程度的面孔类别（种族、性别、年龄和物种）对我们面部专业知识获取的影响有系统的不同方式：随着对一种面孔类别（例如，女性面孔）的经验比另一种面孔类别（例如，男性面孔）的经验增加，儿童更善于识别经验丰富的面孔类别（例如，识别女性面孔比识别男性面孔更好），但更善于将经验不足的面孔分类（例如，将男性面孔分类为“男性”比将女性面孔分类为“女性”更好）。这一研究项目将为形成面部处理能力发展的全面图景和描述经验在面部专业知识形成中的作用提供急需的信息。我们的研究应该促进儿童和成人面部加工的一般理论的发展。我们为这个项目改进的方法可以用于临床研究和评估，包括自闭症和发展性面孔失认症在内的非典型面部处理发展轨迹的儿童。我们的研究结果还可能提供有关种族、性别和年龄等社会偏见的起源的信息，以及减少这些偏见的方法。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose a set of developmental studies of face expertise acquisition from infancy to adolescence. An international team of researchers will advance significantly our on-going research program (R01 HD046526: 2004-2010) to investigate how children's face expertise acquisition is tuned by experience in their unique environments. We will use two research strategies to establish linkages between experiences and face expertise acquisition. First, we will sample infants and children from several countries to capitalize on their naturally occurring experiential differences with faces of different races, genders, ages, and species. Second, we use a training paradigm to experimentally induce different experiences with faces of various categories to infants and children. In contrast to traditional face processing studies that employ static face exemplars, we will test participants with the more naturalistic dynamic facial stimuli. This method should provide a sensitive measure of infants' and children's ability to extract characteristic properties of the face such as its race, gender, age, species, and identity. We will concurrently examine children's recognition and categorization of faces of different races, genders, ages, and species. We will test a general hypothesis that while the human visual system may favor face-like stimuli at birth, much of our face processing ability is acquired through experience with thousands of faces during development. Different degrees of exposure to various categories of faces (race, gender, age, and species) impact on our face expertise acquisition in systematically different ways: With increased experience with one type of face category (e.g., female faces) over another (e.g., male faces), children become better at recognizing the individual faces of the more experienced category (e.g., recognizing individual female faces better than male ones) but better at categorizing the less experienced faces (e.g., categorizing male faces as "male" better than female faces as "female"). This research program will provide much needed information to form a comprehensive picture of the development of face processing abilities and to delineate the role of experience in the formation of face expertise. Our research should facilitate the development of a general theory of face processing in children and adults. The methods we refine for this project can be of use for clinical studies and assessments that involve children with atypical trajectories in the development of face processing including cases of autism and developmental prosopagnosia. Our findings may also provide information about the origin of social biases such as race-, gender-, and age-stereotypes and prejudices, and methods to reduce them. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This research program investigates how typically developing infants and children acquire the ability to classify faces into different categories according to their gender, race, age, and species and the ability to recognize individual faces from within these categories. The results from this research will provide the normative bench mark against which we can evaluate the face processing abilities of children with various developmental and neurological disorders (e.g., autism, William's syndrome, developmental prosopagnosia). The methodologies developed from the program of research will enable clinicians to develop appropriate assessment tools to identify and diagnose infants and children with potential face processing problems. Further, the training method we will test in the present proposed program of research will also allow for the development of evidence-based intervention programs to treat face processing deficits in childhood. Finally, our findings may also provide information about the origin of social biases such as race-, gender-, and age-stereotypes and prejudices, and methods to reduce them.