Examining Face Template Representation and Adaptation Across Social and Emotional Categories in Adults and Children

Abstract

The ability for humans to quickly and accurately extract information from faces is a highly relevant social-cognitive skill. Much of the expertise adults have with faces has been attributed to norm-based coding (Valentine, 1991), referring to cognitive representations of face templates. Our face templates are generated based on our experience with faces and are consistently updating. Several separate face templates for different social categories have been observed. These mental representations can be manipulated within the lab to examine more about adults and children’s organization and reliance on face templates. This dissertation explored how children’s reliance on norm-based coding develops, new circumstances in which separate face representations are formed, and how long in-lab manipulations of multiple face representations persist. Chapter 2 revealed novel information about children’s reliance on norm-based coding for facial expression perception, demonstrating a long developmental trajectory to adult-like perception from 6-15 years of age. Chapter 3 discovered a new social categorical mental representation, religion. This chapter demonstrated that adults are capable of having separate cognitive representations for Christian and Muslim faces if the religion is made relevant to them; however, this was not observed in 8-year-olds. Chapter 4 found the first ability to manipulate mental representations of faces that are diverse, and that diversity itself can be a cue to face category membership. Chapter 5 examined how long manipulating multiple face representations persists through an opposing aftereffects paradigm, revealing a slower decay from other forms of manipulations. These studies demonstrated the complex nature of our cognitive face representations. This dissertation contributes new discoveries on norm-based coding, uncovering children’s developing reliance on norm-based coding, new circumstances in which separate face templates evolve in adults and children, and how long manipulating our face space may persist under opposing aftereffects paradigms. Recognizing differences in faces is an essential human skill; examining face template representations allows for discovering how our mind develops this face perception expertise.