Conceptual knowledge increasingly supports emotion understanding as perceptual contribution declines with age

Human’s abilities to reason about what others may be feeling undergo prolonged development throughout childhood and adolescence, yet the mechanisms driving the emergence of these skills remain elusive. This set of studies, conducted within the same sample of 5- to 10-year-old children, examines how spontaneous perceptual discrimination of facial configurations and activation of conceptual knowledge about emotions become integrated across development. Perceptual discrimination is measured using an EEG frequency tagging paradigm (Study 1). Conceptual knowledge is evaluated with a conceptual similarity rating task (Study 2). Two behavioral tasks (sorting and matching) are employed to assess emotion understanding (Study 3). Representational similarity analysis assesses the predictive effects of perceptual discrimination and conceptual knowledge on children’s behavioral judgments. Here we show that while the ability to discriminate stereotypical facial configurations emerges by preschool age, its influence diminishes with age. In contrast, children’s inferences about other people’s emotions come to rely more on conceptual knowledge with increasing age (and, presumably, social experience).