Abstract
Faces are essential for everyday social interactions and are crucial for recognition of family and friends or judgments of sex, age, and intention of individuals. Over the last two decades, a great deal has been learned about human adults’ ability to process faces and its developmental origin. There is a general consensus that we become face experts (Carey, 1992) and that the immature face processing system present at birth develops with experience as the developing face system of the infant is shaped and influenced by the visual environment (see Lee et al., 2011, for a review).
New technologies such as eye tracking have provided powerful tools to investigate the issue of face processing and recognition. Faces are also multimodal, and studying the face–voice relation is an important step toward understanding the development of social cognition. This special issue will present the most recent studies in these areas.
The first series of papers focused on face–voice integration. Streri, Coulon and Guellaï reviewed newborns’ abilities for recognizing speaking faces. Lewkowicz and Pons investigated the ability of infants to match native language with visual information. Uttley et al. were interested in the multimodal representation of race in vision and speech in 6-month-olds.
Seven additional articles examine visual scanning patterns for other-race and other-species faces, speaking faces, and the role of experience in the development of these behaviours. Di Giorgio et al. investigated 3-month-old infants’ preference for human faces over monkey faces and found interesting differences in the attention toward the eye region. Xiao et al. compared face scanning for own- and other-race faces between 3 and 9 months of age and showed that the scanning pattern changes across ages. Kubicek et al. investigated 12-month-olds’ eye gaze when watching faces silently talking native/other language and demonstrated that the amount of attention devoted to the mouth is affected by the language spoken. Rennels et al. traced the sex difference observed in face recognition in adults to the infancy period using eye tracking. Wagner et al. examined infants’ attention to their mother’s face and a stranger’s face at 6, 9, and 12 months using eye-tracking and report a link between attention to eyes at 6 months and social abilities at 18 months. Kim and Johnson examined the interaction between an infant-directed face and a happy face, and argue that infant responding to infant-directed faces may be mediated by the fact that those faces depict happy emotion. Senju et al. investigated the effect of culture on face scanning, comparing European and Japanese participants when they viewed dynamic face stimuli, and observed cultural difference in gaze following.
Finally, with more classic development tasks, DeNicola et al. failed to find a preference for faces over objects in 4- to 8-month-old infants, but showed that faces are effective in holding infants’ attention. Brenna et al. reported that if a face presents at least one feature connoting happiness, its recognition will be facilitated at 3 months of age. Rigato et al. found that facial expression modulated the use of gaze direction. De Heering & Schiltz investigated detection of spacing variations and found that sensitivity to spacing information improved between 6 and 16 years of age, but only for the eye region.
The impact of training/experience on face processing was investigated by Macchi Cassia et al., who found that the presence of a younger sibling during childhood improves the ability to process neonates’ faces in children, and by Mondloch et al., who studied the face preference in a special infant population who had early visual deprivation. Mondloch et al. found that infants at 12 weeks of age who were treated for bilateral congenital cataracts did not prefer a positive-contrast face over a negative-contrast face when tested within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. This result demonstrates the experience-dependent aspect of some aspects of the early face processing system.
This special issue illustrates some of the diversity and complexity of research and theorizing into face processing and its development in infancy and early childhood. We hope that the issue will bring readers up to date on the latest thinking and findings in a fast moving area of research in developmental science.