Cognitive Daily has a good research summary on facial recognition, a topic we discussed while talking about perception.
Cognitive Daily: Why grown-ups are better than kids at recognizing faces:
You might expect that 8-year-olds, who spend each day in class with dozens of kids their same age, might be better at distinguishing between 8-year-old faces than adults. But in fact there was no significant difference in accuracy for comparing 8-year-old faces versus adult faces, for either adults or kids. Adults were still significantly more accurate than kids, both for adult faces and 8-year-old faces.The researchers say this demonstrates that adults aren’t better at face recognition because of experience: arguably kids have more experience with the faces of kids their own age. This must mean that adults’ superior ability to recognize faces is due to their greater general cognitive ability. This would also explain why adults are better at recognizing monkey faces.
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