Perceptualand MororSkillr, 2002,94,281-295. O Perceptual and Motor Skills 2002 CHILDREN'S FACE RECOGNITION IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS: THE ROLE OF ENCODING STRATEGIES ' GUDRUN SCHWARZER AND CLAUDIA M. ROEBERS Strmmay.-In this study, the relationship benveen face recognition and d&erent facial encoding strategies was investigated. Children (6-8 years, N= 134) participated in both a face recognition task and an encoding task. During the recognition task, they saw 7 target faces in an eyewitness context (video) or in a neutral context (static black and white slides) which they later had to recognize from a set of 21 faces. On the encoding task, the same children had to categorize new isces (schematic and pho- torealistic) into nvo categories. The construction of the carcgnr~t:~ allowed participants to encode the faces either analyticaUy (by focusing on a suigle .~ttribute) or holistically (in terms of overall similarity). The results showed that face recognition was better in the social than in the neutral context. In the neutral context, only holistic encoding was connected to better face recognition. In the social context, children seemed to use not only information about the faces but also information about the persons. Face recognition has an impressive start in early infancy. In the first weeks of Me, infants can already identify their mothers' faces from a set of photographs of adult faces (e.g., Bushnell, 1982; Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin, 1989; Pascahs, de Schoenen, Morton, Deruelle, & Fabre-Grenet, 1995). Not- withstanding these capabhties, face recognition continues to undergo devel- opment during the first decade of life. The typical developmental function of the recognition of unfamhar faces indicates that 6-yr.-olds perform just better than chance compared to a recognition rate of approximately 90% by 10-yr.-old children (see Carey, 1981, 1996). However, this developmental function could only be observed in a neutral context of a typical face recog- nition experiment where children saw sratic faces without any social interac- tion. By contrast, face recognition studies involving face presentation in a more social context such as in the context of children as eyewitnesses show- ed no developmental function. In this kind of social context both older chil- dren (around 9-10 years) and children from the age of 3 years onwards could select target faces from a set of distractors (Marin, Holmes, Guth, & Kovac, 1979; Goodman & Reed, 1986; Baker-Ward, Gordon, Ornstein, Lar- us, & Clubb, 1993). One explanation for these differences in children's face- recognition capabhties in different contexts could be the use of different 'Address enquiries to Gudrun Schwarzer, Ph.D., Friedrich-Miescher-Laboratory of the Max- Planck-Society, Spemannstrasse 34, 72076 Tijbingen, Germany or e-mail (gudrun.schwarzer@ tuebingen.mpg.de).