…The development of face processing during infancy and childhood is one of the most extensively researched topics in perceptual development (6, 32). There is general agreement that face processing begins at birth because newborns: prefer face-like stimuli (see figure 2) to non-face stimuli (4); imitate another’s facial movements (33); prefer familiar over unfamiliar faces (34, 35); and attend to attractive over unattractive faces (36). However, some of these preferences at birth may reflect newborns’ general tendency to look at certain stimulus-general configurations that happen to be similar to faces (37). Despite this early start, researchers also agree that face expertise development is protracted with some investigators arguing that children reach adult levels only after puberty (38). More recently, however, Crookes and McKone (39) suggested that the face processing system was already very much mature by 5-6 years of age. The extensive literature notwithstanding, surprisingly, the role of experience in the development of face processing ability has until recently received little attention.
…This review of the developmental literature reveals early competence in face processing abilities, with infants presenting a preference for face stimuli and facial discrimination using featural, configural, and holistic cues. This early competence is then later refined as evidenced by age-related changes throughout childhood. Some of the refinements are likely due to the development of general cognitive abilities, whereas some others (e.g., configural processing) may be face-specific.
Although biological factors may initially play some role in biasing the newborn’s visual system towards faces in their environment, the existing evidence overwhelmingly suggests the important role of experience in the development of face processing expertise. The role of experience has been implicated in all aspects of the development of face processing expertise and from infancy through childhood. For example, it is evident that experience plays a crucial role in infants’ discrimination and children’s identity judgments for different categories of faces (i.e., species, race, gender, age), with better recognition abilities for the more familiar face categories (i.e., own-species, own-race, female, and own-age). However, considering the quasi-experimental nature of the existing studies, well-controlled experiments that directly manipulate experience (e.g., training studies) are needed to establish fully the causal linkage between differential experience and the development of face processing abilities.
The present review of the existing literature on the development of face processing has also revealed significant gaps in our research endeavors. While most of the recent exciting discoveries have been made with infants in all aspects of face processing, relatively limited knowledge has been gained about childhood face processing abilities, except for the development of facial configural processing. Future studies need to examine how children’s classification of faces at the basic and various subordinate categorical levels develops with age and to what extent such classification is related to their increasing abilities to process faces at the individual level, which in turn will provide a more comprehensive developmental account of the formation of face processing expertise.
