Face Recognition in Young Children: When the Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

Do young children recognize faces differently than older children and adults? Previous research (Carey Diamond, 1977) has suggested that, before the age of 8, children recognize a face by its individual features; after the age of 8, they switch to a whole-face (holistic) recognition strategy. The part–whole paradigm provides a suitable test for the encoding switch hypothesis. In this paradigm, memory for a face part is probed when the part is presented in isolation and in the whole face. The difference in performance between the two test conditions serves as an index of holistic processing. Results from such studies reveal that even 6-year-olds remember parts from upright faces better when tested in the whole-face context than in isolation. When faces are inverted, the holistic processes of young children and older children are disrupted. These results indicate that counter to the encoding switch hypothesis, children recognize faces holistically by 6 years of age.