Natural Experience Modulates the Processing of Older Adult Faces in Young Adults and 3-Year-Old Children
Natural Experience Modulates the Processing of Older Adult Faces in Young Adults and 3-Year-Old Children
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0057499
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发表时间：
2013-02-27
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Cassia, Viola Macchi
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Proietti, Valentina;Pisacane, Antonella;Cassia, Viola Macchi
就像其他面孔尺寸一样，年龄会影响成年人和儿童处理面孔的方式。然而，目前还不清楚这种影响到底在什么条件下发生在两个年龄段，因为有一些混合的证据表明，同龄人的脸在整个生命周期中存在系统性的加工优势(同龄偏见)。结果的不一致可能源于这样一个事实，即个体的面部表征适应于代表环境中存在的面部的最主要的年龄特征，这反映了个体的特定生活条件和社会经验。在本研究中，我们考察了两组成年人(实验1)和两组3岁儿童(实验2)对年轻和年长成人面孔的加工，他们与老年人积累了不同的经验。与老年人的接触影响了成人和儿童参与者在多大程度上表现出更大的辨别能力和对结构/特征线索的更强敏感性，这是通过反转效应的大小来衡量的。在儿童中，老年人面部反转效应的大小也与与老年人接触的次数显著相关。这些结果表明，在成年人和儿童中，对老年人面孔的视觉体验可以调整感知处理策略，以消除参与者通常对这些面孔表现出的相对于年轻人面孔的歧视劣势。
Just like other face dimensions, age influences the way faces are processed by adults as well as by children. However, it remains unclear under what conditions exactly such influence occurs at both ages, in that there is some mixed evidence concerning the presence of a systematic processing advantage for peer faces (own-age bias) across the lifespan. Inconsistency in the results may stem from the fact that the individual's face representation adapts to represent the most predominant age traits of the faces present in the environment, which is reflective of the individual's specific living conditions and social experience. In the current study we investigated the processing of younger and older adult faces in two groups of adults (Experiment 1) and two groups of 3-year-old children (Experiment 2) who accumulated different amounts of experience with elderly people. Contact with elderly adults influenced the extent to which both adult and child participants showed greater discrimination abilities and stronger sensitivity to configural/featural cues in younger versus older adult faces, as measured by the size of the inversion effect. In children, the size of the inversion effect for older adult faces was also significantly correlated with the amount of contact with elderly people. These results show that, in both adults and children, visual experience with older adult faces can tune perceptual processing strategies to the point of abolishing the discrimination disadvantage that participants typically manifest for those faces in comparison to younger adult faces.