6歳児における未知顔の認知処理 : 外装の影響による検討の妥当性

Regarding recognition process for unknown faces in childen, the clothing research by Carey & Diamond(1977) supported the" shift hypothesis" that has suggested a shift from piecemeal processing to configurational processing. However, it has been claimed that clothing presentation interferes with attentional focus on piecemeal information and configurational information, both of which are facial internal information. This research aims to evaluate whether influence of clothing could be a negative evidence of configurational processing in 6-year children. In an experiment, forty four children were asked to remember a target face in an encoding phase, and to detect the target among stimulus set which consisted of a target and three distracters in a test phase. For the encoding phase, two conditions were set for clothing( hats or other clothing). In a 'distraction clothing' condition, a target was presented with clothing that was greatly different from those of distracters. In 'same clothing' condition, a target and distracters had the same clothing. For both clothing conditions, in the test phase, target and distracters with no distinctive clothing were presented upright or upside down. Results showed that clothing had an interference effect, that is, the performance in the test phase was better in 'same clothing' condition than 'distraction clothing' condition. Furthermore, in 'same clothing' condition, performance was better when test stimuli were presented upright than when inverted. Thus, 6-year old children showed both interference effects of clothing presentation and the 'inversion effect' of face recognition. Because the inversion effect is thought to reflect configurational processing of face, lowering of performance by clothing information would not suggest the dependence of facial recognition in 6-year old children on the piecemeal processing.