The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

Recently, various studies have clarified that humans can immediately make social evaluations from facial appearance and that such judgment have an important role in several social contexts. However, early development of this skill has not been well investigated. In the current study, we used computer-generated Caucasian faces to assess the universality of perceiving facial impressions in Asian children. According to the previous studies, it is possible that there could be both universality and some cultural differences depends on the kind of impressions. We found some differences in the development of impression formation. In sum, trustworthiness and dominance judgment become more consistent as glowing up whereas competence judgment could be more difficult to the children. Together with the adults’ data, there could be some differences among cultures and ages. It is possible that there are various information which induce various impressions and the detectability of information should varies by the impressions.