Kids Recognize Faces Better Than Adults

Aug. 18, 2009 -- Scientists have found one reason why children are better than adults at distinguishing between the faces of children.

Tirta Susilo, of the psychology department at the Australian National University in Canberra, and colleagues reported their findings in the journal PLoS One.

"Face processing itself is one of the most, if not the most, remarkable abilities of the human visual system," said Susilo, who carried out the research.

"When you think about it, faces are all alike. They all have two eyes, a nose, a mouth and they all share the same structure … (yet) we find it very easy to discriminate and recognize hundreds even thousands of faces with ease."

It is well known that people find it easier to distinguish between the faces of people from their own race, compared to those from a different race.

For example, Caucasians find many Asian faces look the same, and Asians find many Caucasian faces look the same.

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It is also known that adults recognize the faces of other adults better than the faces of children.

One theory to explain these "own-race" and "own-age" biases, depends on the concept of "holistic processing", which is how the brain recognizes faces.

Instead of analyzing individual components, such as the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, separately, when we look at a face we take a whole snapshot of it.

In the past, scientists have found that we recognize the faces of those best, the stronger holistic processing we have for that face type.

Thus it has been found that Caucasians have stronger holistic processing for the faces of other Caucasians than of Asians; and adults have stronger holistic processing of the faces of other adults than for children.

But, said Susilo, no one has ever checked to see whether this also applies to children.