How children learn to read faces

Dr Marie Smith, lecturer in psychology in Birkbeck’s Department of Psychological Sciences, and co-principal investigators, Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith, professorial research fellow at Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, and Dr Emily Farran from the Institute of Education, will run the two-year research project, applying methodologies from developmental psychology, psychophysics and cognitive neuroimaging to examine how face-processing skills develop through childhood.

 “One of the most important skills humans possess is the ability to rapidly and accurately ‘read’ faces,” said Dr Smith. “However, children and adults process faces differently, with aspects of adult-like processing not emerging until the teenage years.

“While adults tend to look at the whole face and use a broad range of visual information, children typically focus on particular features, or specific details. By recording children’s brain activity we will be able to see what parts of a face children are using and how this develops as they get older.”

Visual information

Dr Smith’s research is unique in proposing to assign information processing functionality to brain activity in children aged between six and 11. The aim is to answer some fundamental questions about how children process faces, tracking the development of their information processing and comparing it to adults, including the visual information children use to categorise faces by gender, identify and emotional expression.

Faces display six basic emotions – happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger – which are thought to be universally recognised across cultures and backgrounds. Previous research has identified the information underlying the correct categorisation of these six facial expressions and a neutral face in adults, and the new Birkbeck project will extend this to children.

“Up to now, research has focused on the adult face-processing system, leaving unresolved the fundamental question of how these abilities develop in children,” adds Dr Smith. “We will establish the behavioural and neural information processing strategies used by children to extract social information from faces.”

Stranger awareness

The project will also explore facial identity and expression in individuals with Williams Syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder which causes a fascination with faces.  

People with Williams Syndrome have hypersociability and reduced stranger awareness, which can make them socially vulnerable, and this research will help establish whether individuals with the disorder are, for example, less able to process negative emotions.

“The results will help inform interventions for vulnerable individuals, to improve their social functioning in our very social world,” adds Dr Smith. “ We hope the research may also have some application for children with autism and conduct disorders.”