The development of face recognition: featural or configurational processing?

Three experiments were conducted on the development of face recognition. Results of Experiment 1 showed, contrary to previous research, that young children can ignore featural information when it has no discriminative value and attend to the internal attributes of the face. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to explore developmental differences in the perception of faces, specifically differences in use of configurational and featural information. In Experiment 2, configurations of stimulus faces were manipulated. In Experiment 3, featural information in stimulus faces was manipulated. The results of both experiments point to a lack of developmental differences in face recognition styles, as well as to a tendency of both children and adults to rely on configurational information more than featural information.