Many social factors can influence how well adults remember faces. Previous research has shown that adults are best at remembering the faces of members of their social group – including members of their own race or gender. They’re also better at identifying the emotions of members of their group. Even when adults are randomly assigned to a made-up team (e.g., the “blue” or “green” team), they are better at remembering their teammates’ faces than faces from the other team. In this study, we want to know whether children show the same tendencies.
To find out, we assign children (ages 4-12) to either the “blue team” or the “green team.” Then we show them a series of faces with either a blue or green background, indicating which team each person belongs to. For some children, we ask what emotion each face is expressing. For others, we ask them to try to remember all of the faces that they see. To make this memory game a little harder, we distract children with a hidden-picture game for a few minutes after they have studied the faces. Last, we show children a mixture of the faces they saw in the first part of the study and new, unfamiliar faces. We ask them to tell us if each face is one that they have seen before or not.
We predict that older children (around 11-12 years old) will remember faces of their own teammates better than faces on the other team, and they may also be better at identifying the emotions of their teammates.
This study will help us understand how social information can influence our ability to remember others’ faces, and how these processes develop in children.
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This research is conducted by the Interpersonal Perception and Communication Lab at Tufts University