Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of subjective-familiarity vs. unfamiliarity and the age of faces (adult faces vs. child faces) on immediate and delayed face recognition in preschool children. Subjective-familiarity is a feeling that one takes unfamiliar faces as resembling actual familiar ones. Fifty-six preschool children were given instructions which made them focus on either Subjectively Familiar Face (SFF) or Unfamiliar Face (UF), and No-Instruction (NI) condition was set as a control. In the SFF condition the subjects were required to judge whether the faces resembled someone they knew; in the UF condition they were required to pick out faces new to them. The major findings were that the SFF instruction facilitated recognition scores (d′) and this tendency was especially strong in the delayed test. These results were interpreted as showing that the SFF instruction enhanced information processing at the constructional coding level. One of the reasons why preschool children are deficient in recognizing unfamiliar faces is that they have not yet developed the ability to process information at the constructional coding level.
