Development of facial identification: How do young children process internal and external features?

To identify or recognize human faces accurately, one needs to attend to internal facial information (i.e., eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, and chin) while disregarding inappropriate external cues (i.e., hairstyles). Young children’s tendency to attend to external rather than internal information is believed to explain their inferior performance in facial processing compared with that of adults. This article focused on experimental studies regarding developmental differences in attending to and using internal and external information for facial identification. First, experimental studies from the 1970s to the 2010s were reviewed. Second, methodological problems of earlier studies, such as a lack of total facial configurations, were discussed and recent studies using new methodologies were introduced. Finally, we presented a progressive approach to clarifying the developmental changes that occur in facial processing