AsianScientist (May 27, 2015) – A study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience has found that face perception in Japanese children is comparable to that of adults by the age of 13 years, slightly earlier than Western children.
Face perception plays an important role in social communication. There have been many studies of face perception in human using non-invasive neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods, but studies of face perception in children are quite limited.
Previous studies in adults with the EEG demonstrated a special EEG component, N170, which appears at approximately 170 milliseconds during object perception in adults. N170 was shown to be larger during the viewing of faces than during the observation of other objects, such as cars or chairs and was found to be longer and larger when the eyes were being examined than during the viewing of upright faces. Therefore, N170 has been proposed to reflect face perception processing.
In addition, N170 was found to be longer during the observation of inverted faces than during the viewing of upright faces in adult. In the case of children, previous research showed that younger individuals do not reach the adult’s pattern of N170 until 14 years of age.
In the present study, a research team led by Dr. Kensuke Miki and Professor Ryusuke Kakigi, of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, investigated the development of face perception in Japanese children, by using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
They analyzed the face-related N170 component by viewing an upright face, inverted face and eyes stimuli in 82 Japanese children aged between 8- and 13-years-old. Unlike adults were N170 had a sharp, single peak, N170 was longer and had at least two peaks in the 8 to 11-year-old children. 12 to 13-year-old children, however, showed a similar N170 peak as the adults.
In addition, significant differences in N170 latency were observed among all three types of stimuli in the 13-year-old children, with the inverted face stimuli producing the longer latency than the upright face stimuli, similar to the adult’s pattern of N170.
The team has concluded that the face perception of Japanese children almost matured by the age of 13 years. In addition, their findings differed from those of previous studies of Western children with regard to the age at which the adult response pattern was observed and showed that cultural differences might have been one of the reasons for this.
“This was the first study to investigate the development of face perception in a large number of Japanese children. We are expecting that this result can be applied for understanding of the face perception of the children with the autism spectrum disorder,” said Miki.
The article can be found at: Miki et al. (2015) Differential Age-related Changes In N170 Responses To Upright Faces, Inverted Faces, And Eyes In Japanese Children .
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Source: National Institutes of Natural Sciences.
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