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

成年人是处理面孔的专家，因为他们在社交互动中迅速、毫不费力地从面孔中破译信息。然而，成人面孔技术的一个特点是，它仅限于成年人最有经验的那些面孔类别。其结果是，辨别和识别属于不太熟悉的面孔类别(例如，其他物种、其他种族和其他年龄的面孔)的个人的能力减弱。成人脸部知觉的这种特性起源于婴儿期。因此，人们推测，特定面孔类别的经验必须发生在生命的早期，否则永远不会获得该面孔类别的专业知识。然而，还没有人研究成人脸部加工系统的全部可塑性。拟议的研究计划将通过揭示随着成年人对这一陌生面孔类别获得越来越多的经验而对其他种族面孔的感知如何变化，来填补这一文献中的空白。

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.