Stimulus properties, attentional limitations, and young children's face recognition.

The present research explored 3-, 7-, and 10-yr.-old children's face recognition in a "paraphernalia-to-fool" paradigm in which angular size of the stimuli was manipulated. It was proposed that, given the attentional limitations of the two youngest age groups, facial information and irrelevant paraphernalia would be perceived as an undifferentiated whole in stimuli of small visual angles, resulting in decreased recognition. However, increasing angular size should enable the 7-yr.-olds to differentiate the two types of stimulus information more easily. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the influence of paraphernalia on 7-yr.-olds' performance would be moderated by the spatial size of the stimulus. The effect of angular size was also expected to interact with age group. As predicted, 10-yr.-olds were unaffected by the size manipulation, 7-yr.-olds' performance was moderated by angular size, and, although 3-yr.-olds' recognition improved with large stimuli, the increase was not significant. Results are discussed in relation to the influence of stimulus properties and age-related attentional limitations.