The Cognitive and Neural Development of Face Recognition in Humans

Conventional wisdom has long held that face recognition develops very slowly throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence, with perceptual experience as the primary engine of this development. However, striking new findings from just the last few years have overturned much of this traditional view by demonstrating genetic influences on the face recognition system as well as impressive face discrimination abilities present in newborns and in monkeys who were reared without ever seeing a face. Nevertheless, experience does play a role, for example in narrowing the range of facial subtypes for which discrimination is possible and perhaps also increasing discrimination abilities within that range. Here we first describe the cognitive and neural characteristics of the adult system for face recognition, and then we chart the development of this system over infancy and childhood. This review identifies a fascinating new puzzle to be targeted in future research: all qualitative aspects of adult face recognition measured behaviorally are present very early in development (by 4 yrs of age; all that have been tested are also present in infancy) – yet fMRI and ERP evidence shows very late maturity of face-selective neural responses (with the fusiform face area increasing substantially in volume between age 7 and adulthood).

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