ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the origins of facial recognition. It focuses on the infant’s ability to discriminate among and to recognize representations of faces during the first 7 months of life. The chapter reviews data on some of the individual difference and stimulus parameters that control infant’s recognition of faces. Prior to a survey of the principal findings, a basic measure of infant visual perception is noted: the tendency of the infant to devote more fixations to some stimuli than to others. One such naturally occurring preference is more attention to a novel than to a previously seen target. The infants facility in discriminating among faces on a recognition task depends on the kind of representation employed. In an initial study, discrimination among face masks or among photographs were readily accomplished by 5-to 6-month-old infants, whereas subjects tested with less veridical representations gave no evidence of discrimination or recognition.
