Summary: Researchers report that as adolescents move toward adulthood, they begin to perceive faces differently.
Source: Penn State
Faces are as distinctive as fingerprints and convey rich information about health, personality, age, and emotion. New research from Penn State shows that the way adolescents view faces shifts during puberty, reshaping social perception as they prepare for adult roles.
Suzy Scherf, assistant professor of psychology and head of the Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience at Penn State, together with graduate student Giorgia Picci, published these findings in the journal Psychological Science. “We know faces transmit a great deal of social information, and the ability to perceive and interpret that information changes across development,” Scherf said. “For the first time in humans, we demonstrate that pubertal status — not chronological age — influences how face recognition develops as individuals transition to adulthood.”
Scherf and Picci argue that this shift in face processing is part of a broader social metamorphosis in adolescence. As children move through puberty, their face-processing system retunes: young children show a caregiver bias, favoring adult female faces, while adolescents develop a peer bias, showing enhanced recognition for faces that match their own pubertal status. Prior animal studies have suggested similar processes, but this study provides direct evidence in humans.
The team designed an innovative experiment to isolate pubertal stage from chronological age, addressing a limitation of earlier work that focused on the age of faces rather than their pubertal characteristics. Scherf explained that hormones and neural reorganization during puberty likely drive this recalibration of social perception, subtly changing which faces adolescents are most likely to notice and remember.
One hundred sixteen adolescents and young adults participated and were grouped into four pubertal stages determined by both self-assessment and parent-provided assessments. Crucially, many participants shared the same chronological age but differed in pubertal maturity, allowing the researchers to link differences in face recognition directly to pubertal development rather than age.
Participants viewed 120 grayscale photographs of male and female faces that varied by pubertal status. The face set included images representing pre-pubescent children, early pubertal adolescents, later pubertal adolescents, and sexually mature young adults. During the computerized task, participants first studied 10 neutral-expression target faces. They were then presented with a test set of 20 faces showing happy expressions and asked to indicate for each whether they had seen it before or if it was new. This procedure measured recognition memory for faces across pubertal categories.
Results showed a clear developmental shift. Pre-pubescent children demonstrated a consistent caregiver bias: they were better at remembering adult female faces despite spending a great deal of time with peers. By contrast, adolescents showed a peer bias. Among participants of the same age, those who were less advanced in pubertal development had improved recognition for less mature peers, while those further along in puberty remembered more mature peers better.
“This indicates adolescents are highly attuned to each other’s pubertal status,” Scherf noted. “They seem to detect developmental cues in faces, perhaps implicitly, and this detection influences how they track and remember peers. The finding may help explain why adolescents tend to organize peer groups by pubertal stage and why peer relationships and early romantic interests emerge during this period.”
The research offers a new perspective on the well-documented adolescent dip in face recognition by reframing it as a functional recalibration: the face-processing system shifts focus from caregivers toward peers as puberty advances. Understanding this timeline of perceptual and social changes can inform studies of adolescent brain development and guide interventions in mental health and education.
Funding: Scherf is among the co-funded faculty at Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI). Project support came from SSRI, Penn State’s Department of Psychology, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to Giorgia Picci.
Source: Kristie Auman-Bauer, Penn State
Image Source: Image adapted from the Penn State press release.
Original Research: Abstract for “From Caregivers to Peers: Puberty Shapes Human Face Perception” by Giorgia Picci and K. Suzanne Scherf in Psychological Science. Published online September 22, 2016. doi:10.1177/0956797616663142
Penn State. “Puberty Changes Facial Recognition.” NeuroscienceNews. 28 September 2016.
Abstract
From Caregivers to Peers: Puberty Shapes Human Face Perception
Puberty prepares mammals for sexual reproduction and is also hypothesized to trigger a social metamorphosis that readies adolescents for adult social roles. This study provides evidence that pubertal development retunes the human face-processing system from a caregiver bias to a peer bias. Before puberty, children show superior recognition for adult female faces. As puberty progresses, superior recognition emerges for peers who match an individual’s pubertal status, and the peer recognition bias strengthens with advancing pubertal development. Adolescents become better at recognizing faces with a similar pubertal status to their own. These results reconceptualize the adolescent dip in face recognition as a recalibration away from caregivers and toward peers. In addition to preparing the body for reproduction, puberty shapes perceptual systems that process the social world.
“From Caregivers to Peers: Puberty Shapes Human Face Perception” by Giorgia Picci and K. Suzanne Scherf in Psychological Science. Published online September 22, 2016. doi:10.1177/0956797616663142