Children's sensitivity to configural cues in faces undergoing rotational motion

One account of face processing in childhood claims that featural cue processing dominates early in life, and more sophisticated configural cue processing skills emerge more gradually. The opposing view holds that most experimental demonstrations of diminished configural processing in early childhood reflect overall cognitive immaturity, not a true insensitivity to configural cues. This is typically assessed in discrimination tasks, via recognition accuracy with upright faces, as well as “inversion effects”, relatively high performance with upright faces compared to relatively low performance with inverted faces. Larger relative inversion effects are taken to indicate proficiency in configural processing, which is specific to upright faces. In adults, the less sophisticated featural processing is assumed to proceed when configural cues are inaccessible, as in the case of an inverted face. Compared to adults, children typically have shown worse general performance with upright faces, as well as smaller inversion costs. The current study investigated the ability of motion to facilitate configural cue processing in 8 year-old children. The use of a 3D-based stimulus production system allowed us to generate facial stimuli that could be rotated in depth, which were presented in a typical discrimination task. The utility of rotational motion has seldom been explored in previous developmental tests. The current study failed to find evidence of a configural deficit in children relative to adults was not found. Additionally, the hypothesis that motion information would allow children to construct a stronger configural representation was not supported. These data are discussed in the context of task-specific encoding strategies.