ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Emotion Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1454312
Capturing Variability in Children's Faces: An Artificial, yet Realistic, Face Stimulus Set
Provisionally accepted
- 1Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada
- 2Booth School of Business, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Children's faces are underrepresented in face databases, and existing databases that do focus on children tend to have limitations in terms of the number of faces available and the diversity of ages and ethnicities represented. To improve the availability of children's faces for experimental research purposes, we created a novel face database that contains 500 artificial images of children that are diverse in terms of both age (ages 3 to 10) and ethnicity (representing 15 different racial or ethnic groups). Using deep neural networks, we produced a large collection of synthetic photographs that look like naturalistic, realistic faces of children. To assess the representativeness of the dataset, adult participants (N = 585) judged the age, gender, ethnicity, and emotion of artificial faces selected from the set of 500 images. The images present a diverse array of artificial children's faces, offering a valuable resource for research requiring children's faces. The images and ratings are publicly available to researchers on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/m78r4/?view_only=f8238e0efb2c4685ae6b8192aa23a4e2).
Keywords: Children, Face database, artificial face generation, expressions, Emotions
Received: 25 Jun 2024; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thierry, Uddenberg, Albohn and Todorov. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sophia M Thierry, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada
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