Experience and face perception: Investigating plasticity in the developing and mature systems

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Adults are experts at processing faces, in that they quickly and effortlessly decipher information from faces during social interactions. However, a hallmark of face expertise in adulthood is that it is confined to those face categories with which adults have had the most experience. The result is a diminished ability to discriminate and recognize individuals belonging to less familiar face categories (e.g., faces of other species, other races, and other ages). This property of adult face perception has its origins in infancy. Therefore, it has been postulated that experience with a particular face category must occur early in life, or expertise with that face category will never be attained. However, no one has yet investigated the full extent of plasticity in the adult face processing system. The proposed program of research will fill this gap in the literature by uncovering how the perception of other-race faces changes as adults gain increasing amounts of experience with this unfamiliar face category. One line of research will examine the behavioural and neural correlates of face perception in adults who have varying amounts of exposure to other-race faces. A second line of research will determine whether the developmental trajectory of other-race face recognition differs depending on when exposure to other-race faces occurs (i.e., in adulthood versus childhood). The proposed research has important theoretical implications. There has been no systematic investigation into the limits of behavioural and neural plasticity in the adult face processing system; thus, the results from these experiments will be a key addition to the face perception literature. More broadly, the comparison of plasticity in the adult face processing system to the developing face processing system will provide critical insights into our understanding of sensitive periods in the visual system.