The development of face perception during infancy and childhood is one of the most extensively researched topics in early development, and has resulted in hundreds of articles and many theoretical positions. There is general agreement that there is a domain-specific early face-detection and recognition system that is able to process faces, and will become adult-like with experience. The properties of this early memory and representation system are, however, still controversial, and the role of experience in the development of our 'face perception' abilities is little understood, and also controversial.
This Special Issue presents many of these theoretical views, and the empirical papers present research that illustrate several of the current topics of interest. The first paper is a target paper by Nelson, in which he suggests that face recognition is 'special', and that it is subserved by discrete neural systems. He also proposes that the face processing system develops during the first years of life from a broadly-tuned non-specific complex figure recognition system to a human face-tuned discrimination system. This target paper is discussed, in the following commentaries, by several specialists in the area of face processing.
Over time, infants increasingly have greater exposure to conspecifics, and the specificity of the face recognition system to the faces of one's own species also increases. Pascalis et al. explore this species-specific bias by investigating children's ability to process another species' faces, in this paper, monkey's faces.
In his paper, Nelson reminds us that there is a right hemisphere bias towards processing faces in infants, a bias that is similar to that observed in the adult. In the next paper in this issue, Catherwood et al. explore this hemispheric asymmetry for colour and facial pattern in 6-month-old infants.
The next two papers concern newborns' face perception abilities. Simion et al. ask what parameters or characteristics of the face guide newborns' attraction to faces: they argue that newborns do not respond to face-like stimuli by 'facedness' per se, but rather, by some more general pattern-detecting structural characteristics that best satisfy the constraints of the immature visual system. We have known for some time that newborn infants quickly learn to recognize their mothers' faces, and in his paper, Bushnell develops this finding by asking how much exposure to the face do newborns need in order to recognize their mother, and further, can they still remember their mother after a delay? In fact,