Systematic Distortions in Vertical Placement of Features in Drawings of Faces and Houses

Configural properties of face portraits change between childhood and adulthood

Adult observers are sensitive to the configuration of facial features within a face, able to distinguish between relative differences in feature spacing, and detecting deviations from typical facial appearance. How does the representation of the typical configuration of facial features develop? While there is a great deal of work describing children’s developing abilities to detect differences in feature spacing across face images, there is substantially less work examining what children think constitutes a typical arrangement of facial features. In the current study, we investigated this issue using a production task in which adults and 5- to 10-year-old children created a face “portrait” by arranging the eyes, nose, and mouth of a standard face within an empty outline. Using this simple task, we found differences in face configuration across age groups, such that children of all ages made far larger errors than adult participants, expanding facial features outward from the center of the face more than adults. These results were not affected by face inversion, potentially implying a domain-general rather than face-specific process. We also found that children of all ages endorsed the correct configuration as a best likeness in a perceptual task. We discuss these results in terms of ongoing debate regarding the extent to which configural processing is a meaningful component of face recognition and the conclusions we can draw from production paradigms as compared to purely perceptual tasks.

Eye Placement Bias Is Remarkably Robust

When drawing faces, people show a systematic bias of placing the eyes higher up the head than they are placed in reality. This study investigated the development of this phenomenon while removing the potential confound of drawing ability. Participants (N = 124) in three age groups (3-5 yo, 10-11 yo, and adults) reconstructed two foam faces: one from observation and one from memory. The high eye placement bias was remarkably robust with mean eye placement in every condition significantly higher than the original faces. The same bias was not shown for mouth placement. Eye placement was highest for the youngest participants and for the memory conditions. The results suggest that an eye placement bias is not caused by the motor skill demands required for drawing and lend evidence to the suggestion that an eye placement bias is caused by perceptual and decision-making processes.