Children's consideration of relevant and non-relevant facial features in kinship detection

International audienceThe aim of this study was to clarify the understanding of biological inheritance in children (ages 5, 7, 9 and 11) and adults by using a new methodological approach. In a perceptual task, participants were asked to match the photo of a newborn's face with the one of his/her mother's face, shown along with two other non-kin female faces. The non-kin female faces were either neutral, since they had no perceptual similarity to the newborn's face (control condition), or shared with the target newborn's face a salient perceptual facial feature irrelevant to kin detection, e.g., head orientation, open/closed eyes or mouth (experimental condition). Results showed that children could efficiently detect the mother's face by the age of 9 (control condition). Difficulties ignoring irrelevant salient perceptual properties occurred up to age 9 (experimental condition). We discussed whether these results could correspond to progressive conceptual changes in the understanding of inheritance