Developmental Commonalities between Object and Face Recognition in Adolescence

In the visual perception literature, the recognition of faces has often been contrasted
with that of non-face objects, in terms of differences with regard to the role of parts,
part relations and holistic processing. However, recent evidence from developmental
studies has begun to blur this sharp distinction. We review evidence for a protracted
development of object recognition that is reminiscent of the well-documented slow
maturation observed for faces. The prolonged development manifests itself in a retarded
processing of metric part relations as opposed to that of individual parts and offers
surprising parallels to developmental accounts of face recognition, even though the
interpretation of the data is less clear with regard to holistic processing. We conclude
that such results might indicate functional commonalities between the mechanisms
underlying the recognition of faces and non-face objects, which are modulated by
different task requirements in the two stimulus domains.