Facial expression recognition skills are known to improve across childhood and adolescence, but the mechanisms driving the development of these important social abilities remain unclear. This study investigates directly whether there are qualitative differences in child and adult processing strategies for these emotional stimuli. With a novel adaptation of the Bubbles reverse-correlation paradigm (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001), we added noise to expressive face stimuli and presented sub-sets of randomly sampled information from each image at different locations and spatial frequency bands across experimental trials. Results from our large developmental sample: 71 young children (6 -9years), 69 older children (10-13years) and 54 adults, uniquely reveal profiles of strategic information-use for categorisations of fear, sadness, happiness and anger at all ages. All three groups relied upon a distinct set of key facial features for each of these expressions, with fine-tuning of this diagnostic information (features and spatial frequency) observed across developmental time. Reported variability in the developmental trajectories for different emotional expressions is consistent with the notion of functional links between the refinement of information-use and processing ability.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 6. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 15 August 2017.
All research outputs
#6,443,548
of 25,478,886 outputs
Outputs from Cognition
#1,550
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Outputs of similar age
#94,038
of 327,361 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Cognition
#37
of 85 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,478,886 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 74th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,284 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.4. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 52% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 327,361 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 71% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 85 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 57% of its contemporaries.
