Development of pathern of face recognition among Iranian sample

Face recognition has been attended as a model of children’s perceptual skills development. Faces provide the most important visual stimulus for human communication. Identity, emotional expressions, age and gender are being understood by attending to faces. So, having ability to read faces is an essential element of social and cognitive development. The research shows that children have more difficulty in recognition and encoding of faces than adults. It is unclear, however, whether this difficulty is due to their low information processing skills or their limited experiences on faces. The research aimed to investigates Iranian face recognition skills and to study the role of experience in developing face recognition ability. Participants were three groups of subjects including 22 5- years-olds, 22 9-year-olds and 22 adults. They answered to face recognition tasks consisted in three conditions: full face, inner face and outer face. The results showed that in parallel to increasing age, there were an improvement on both speed and accuracy of responses. These results are consistent with those findings conducted in the western cultures demonstrating a development of children’s face recognition performance on all full, inner and outer tasks. The research support those who claim being universality in face recognition development. The research also supports the role of experience in learning to differentiate the human face features.