Face recognition in the newborn infant

Abstract

In his thoughtful and scholarly review of the literature on face recognition, Charles Nelson gives evidence from a variety of sources to draw a number of conclusions. Two of these are entirely convincing: face recognition is ‘special’, and it is subserved by discrete neural systems. However, one of his major conclusions is that face recognition depends on experience for its acquisition, and in this short commentary, we focus on research with newborn infants and suggest that face recognition abilities are well developed at birth. We present evidence from three sets of studies, in each of which newborn infants have been the subjects of (1) face recognition soon after birth; (2) preferences for attractive faces; and (3) imitation of facial gestures.