Literature review (part 3)

"The development of differential use of inner and outer face features in familiar face identification" by Campbell et al.: Studied schoolchildren, with task of identifying whether the image of a face belongs to a fellow classmate. Had three conditions: 1) use photo of entire face, 2) use just inside of face (crop outside), 3) use just outside of face (white-out internal features). In all conditions using the entire face resulted in the best accuracy, but young children do better with external features than internal features, with the effect flipping around age 9.

Also includes citation to Ellis, Shepherd, and Davies 1979, showing internal features are more useful than external features the more familiar a face. They speculate this may be caused by external features changing periodically in well-known faces

"When does the Inner-face Advantage in Familiar Face Recognition Arise and Why?" by Campbell et al.: The outer-face advantage is when external face information is more useful than internal face information. Shows inner-face advantage in adults when recognizing celebrity faces, with inner-face advantage for children, with the switch happening near age 15. Adolescents with a mental age of under 10 years showed outer-face advantage, suggesting the outer-face advantage is a developmental rather than a maturational phenomenon. This throws some water on the idea of using external face information with long-range photographs, because it is evidence the shift in humans from external focused to internal focused is independent of the improvement in eyesight with age.