ABSTRACT
A growing literature documents the existence and properties of components in adult event-related potentials related to the perception and recognition of faces. For example, the N170 has been related to the structural encoding of physical information in faces (Bentin, Allison, Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 1996; Eimer, 2000a, 2000b), while later components, such as the N400 and P600, have been related to the recognition of facial identity (Eimer, 2000b). In contrast to the numerous studies of these components in adults, much less attention has been paid to their emergence during development. A developmental approach can provide unique insight into understanding the neural correlates of face processing in several ways. First, because different aspects of face processing may emerge at different ages, development provides the possibility of dissociating these aspects and studying them in isolation in a way not possible in adults. For example, in adults there is disagreement over whether the N170 reflects eye detection (Bentin et al., 1996) or encoding of the entire configuration of facial features (Eimer, 2000b). A recent study showing that the N170 response to eyes alone matures by 11 years of age, while that to the full face is not mature until adulthood (Taylor, Edmonds, McCarthy, & Allison, 2001), can be seen as supporting the view that there are separate eye-detection and face-detection generators of the N170 (e.g., Shibata et al., 2002).
