Special issue Infant face preferences after binocular visual deprivation

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old (n 3) or older than 12 weeks (n 4). Like newborns, but unlike visually normal age-matched controls, the patients looked preferentially toward config (three squares arranged as facial features) over its inverted version and none of the older patients preferred a positive-contrast face over the negative-contrast version. We conclude that postnatal changes in face perception are experience-dependent, and that interference with their typical development may contribute to later deficits in face processing. Keywords visual deprivation, face perception, face detection, role of visual experience, infants The remarkable expertise of adults in recognizing the identity of individual faces is attributable to several underlying processes. First, adults have a remarkable ability to detect that a stimulus is a face based on first-order relations (two eyes above a nose and mouth). They do so rapidly even when there are no normal facia