Development of Face Perception

This paper examines the development of face perception mainly in infancy and analyzes to what extent it does reveal a specific process. For that reason data drawn from object perception as well as from perception of one's own face will also be examined. Studying face recognition in infancy is a complex enterprise because several different abilities intervene in this phenomenon : the modes of visual exploration, the categorization ability, the ability to detect invariances, etc. Moreover the methodological paradigms that investigators have at their disposal are different enough to generally lead to divergent conclusions. This is why it is important to review the various methods used to study face perception in infants: the habituation paradigm, the preferential looking paradigm, the scanning studies and the imitation studies. Data obtained with these methods are closely examined in relation to the main distinc­ tions suggested by the investigators in that field : holistic/analytic perception; internal/external bias; featural/prototypical processing. Finally an overall assessment of face recognition development is offered in view of the various data obtained.