Citation

Seitz K. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2003; 17(7): 819-832.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.912

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In contrast to face recognition little is known about the development of unfamiliar whole-person recognition. Various cues in a person's appearance may contribute to recognition performance. An age-related influence of different features on person recognition performance is possible. Here, we investigated two variable features of person recognition, namely posture and clothing, in 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds and adults. The experimental methodology of a short-term recognition-test with an immediate four alternative forced choice (4AFC)-array was used. Targets were shown for 5 seconds. Experiment 1 clearly indicates that a variation of both posture and clothing decreases performance in all age groups compared to a standard, i.e. a no-change condition. An interaction age×variation of posture and clothing was not observed. In order to untangle the two aspects of posture and clothing, Experiment 2 varied only posture between encoding and recognition. An age-effect was shown, but no other significant result occurred. Experiment 3 investigated variation of clothing only, and found main effects of clothing and age. Because there was no interaction between the two factors we infer that a change of clothing impairs all subjects' recognition performance. Children's person recognition performance suffers in a way similar to adults' person recognition performance when clothing is varied. In contrast, changing posture does not necessarily decrease recognition accuracy, neither in children nor in adults. No developmental gains were found for dealing with the transformation of posture and clothing between the encoding and recognition phase. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language: en