Non-monotonic developmental trend of holistic processing in visual expertise: the case of Chinese character recognition

How does face mask in COVID-19 pandemic disrupt face learning and recognition in adults with autism spectrum disorder?

Use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are expected to be more vulnerable to this disruption in face recognition. Here, we recruited typically developing adult participants and those with ASD, and we measured their non-verbal intelligence, autism spectrum quotient, empathy quotient, and recognition performances of faces with and without a face mask covering the lower halves of the face. When faces were initially learned unobstructed, we showed that participants had a general reduced face recognition performance for masked faces. In contrast, when masked faces were first learned, typically developing adults benefit with an overall advantage in recognizing both masked and unmasked faces; while adults with ASD recognized unmasked faces with a significantly more reduced level of performance than masked faces—this face recognition discrepancy is predicted by a higher level of autistic traits. This paper also discusses how autistic traits influence processing of faces with and without face masks.

Developmental trajectories of expert perception processing of Chinese characters in primary school children

Previous studies have demonstrated that inversion effect and left-side bias are stable expertise markers in Chinese character processing among adults. However, it is less clear how these markers develop early on (i.e., among primary school students). Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the development of the two markers by comparing primary school-aged students of three age groups (Grade 1, Grade 3, and Grade 5) and adults in tests of inversion effect (Experiment 1) and left-sided bias effect (Experiment 2). The results replicated that both effects during Chinese character processing were present among adults. However, more importantly, the effects were different among primary school-aged students in different grades: the inversion effect was found as early as in Grade 1, but the left-side bias effect did not emerge in Grade 1 and as approximated that of adults until Grade 3. The study suggested a potential dissociation in developing different aspects of expertise during Chinese character processing in early childhood.