DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

What Has Been Learned About the Development of Face Processing?

The Development of Face Processing in Infancy and Early Childhood: Current Perspectives
Edited by Olivier Pascalis and Alan Slater. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003. 226 pp. Cloth, $62.10.

The human face provides a bewildering variety of messages. It tells us who its bearer is (his or her individual identity, gender, or age) and how the bearer is (his or her emotional and attentional state). Thus, faces are visual stimuli comprising multiple sources of visual and social information. Because of its crucial role for human behavior, the perception of faces seems to be the most developed visual perceptual skill in humans. Therefore, it is not surprising that there has been a plethora of research on this topic.