The development of face processing skills

Abstract

An early orientation to faces is followed by a gradual development of face processing skills. During the course of maturation, children acquire the ability to learn new faces and to deal with facial transformations. Some skills are achieved more quickly than others. Moreover, encoding ability in young children is somewhat different from that shown by older children. The younger groups fail to take advantage of increased inspection time and stimulus characteristics such as facial distinctiveness. They are also more likely to be confused by alterations in background context. Although with familiar faces they reveal very similar identity priming effects to older children and adults, younger children display a relative inefficiency in categorizing faces as being that of a target unless it is noticeably dissimilar. Young children are more likely than older people to prefer positive caricatures of certain faces, which is not consistent with the view that caricature effects are simple reflections of a general expertise with faces.