PRIMING EFFECTS IN CHILDRENS FACE RECOGNITION

Two experiments are described that explore identity priming to faces in children and young adults. Experiment 1 indicated that subjects of five years show the same identity priming reaction time (RT) advantage as older children in a face familiarity task. In the second experiment, five-year-olds and young adults were tested on a task involving identity priming (same picture on each occasion) and non-identity priming (different view of the face on the second occasion). Again the RTs for familiarity judgements were qualitatively the same across ages. For each group, identity priming produced a greater facilitation than non-identity priming. The data are considered alongside those showing the absence of developmental changes in implicit memory.