Learning faces from variability: Four- and five-year-olds differ from older children and adults

•Four- and five-year-olds’ face learning was examined in a perceptual matching task.•Viewing six images of a character helped children identify them in new images.•Viewing six images led children to mistake images of a distractor for the character.•Face learning from variability in appearance is still developing in young children. Children under 6 years of age have difficulty recognizing a familiar face across changes in appearance and telling the face apart from similar-looking people. Understanding the process by which newly encountered faces become familiar can provide insights into these difficulties. Exposure to the ways in which a person varies in appearance is one mechanism by which adults and older children (≥6 years) learn new faces. We provide the first investigation of whether this mechanism for face learning functions in younger children. Children aged 4 and 5 years were read two storybooks featuring an unfamiliar character. Participants viewed six images of the character in one story and one image of the character in the other story. After each story, children were asked to identify novel images of the character that were intermixed with images of a similar-looking distractor. Like older children, 4- and 5-year-olds were more sensitive to identity in the 6-image condition, but they also adapted a less conservative criterion. Young children identified more images of the character after viewing six images versus one image. However, many also incorrectly identified more images of the distractor after viewing six images versus one image, an effect not previously found for older children and adults. These results suggest that this mechanism for face learning is not fully refined before 6 years of age.