Beyond U-Shaped Development in Infants' Processing of Faces: An Information-Processing Account

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative processing of an upright face, but featural processing of an inverted face (Cohen & Cashon, 2001a), the present findings suggest that from 3 to 7 months, infants' ability to integrate facial features follows an N-shaped developmental pattern for upright faces and an inverted U-shaped pattern for inverted faces. We discuss these results in terms of a set of domain-general information-processing principles.