Why faces are not special to newborns: an alternative account of the face preference

ABSTRACT—Newborns ’ visual preference for faces might be re-garded as a proof of the existence of a specific innate bias to-ward this class of stimuli. However, recent research has shown that this putatively face-specific phenomenon might be explained as the result of the combined effect of nonspecific perceptual constraints that stem from the general properties of visual pro-cessing shortly after birth. General, nonspecific biases may tune the system toward certain aspects of the external environment, allowing, through experience, the emergence of increasingly specialized processes devoted to faces. KEYWORDS—face preference; newborns; cognitive specialization; perceptual constraints In daily life, a glance at a face may provide an observer with an impressive amount of different types of information that are of great help in social and cognitive interactions with the surrounding en