DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES IN THE CAPACITY TO PROCESS FACE INFORMATION
Open Access
- Author:
- Von Der Heide, Rebecca Jane
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- July 02, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Michael Wenger And Rick Gilmore, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Rick Owen Gilmore, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Michael Wenger, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- efficiency
face perception
face processing
development
processing capacity
face recognition - Abstract:
- The ability to recognize a face is an ability that improves with age. There is evidence that these improvements in performance are quantitative rather than qualitative, and have been interpreted as an increase in processing capacity (Itier & Taylor, 2004). We report results from a set of experiments designed to apply a precise, theoretically-motivated measure of capacity (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) to this developmental question. Experiment 1 addressed two important questions: (a) whether children could complete the large number of trials needed to effectively use these capacity measures and (b) whether greater variability of children’s response times would prevent clear inferences from being made about changes in processing capacity. The results of Experiment 1 showed that children could complete the large number of trials needed to effectively use these measures of capacity and that interpretable inferences about changes in processing capacity could be made for children using these measures. There was also evidence of an age-related increase in the capacity to process redundant target dot stimuli with age. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to use these measures to test the hypothesis that there are age-related change in the capacity to process face information, specifically changes in configural and featural information. The results of Experiment 2 provided support for this hypothesis. Taken together, this work suggests (a) precise measures of processing capacity are available to use in studies of children (b) a more precise and theoretically-driven account of age-related changes in the capacity to process face information was possible using these measures (c) a parallel can be drawn between the age-related increases in processing capacity in both experiments.