Young children's difficulty in disregarding information from external features when matching unfamiliar faces

We found that children were more likely to base their responses on external hairstyles for the incongruent stimuli, unlike adults (Experiment 1), even when they were instructed to attend to internal features (Experiment 2). Eye movement data showed that both children and adults spent the most time gazing on the internal features and gave little attention to the external hairstyle, and children attended to each part of the internal features as long as, or even longer than, adults (Experiment 3). Children's response based on external hairstyles was due to their inability to disregard external information and was not attributed to their tendency to attend more frequently to external parts rather than internal parts.