Abstract

The purpose of this review was to examine the exact course of the development of face recognition. The focus of discussion was on the issue concerning the occurrence of a developmental "dip" in the young adolescent period. Findings from relevant studies showed that recognition of faces improves with age from about five years to adulthood. However, available data do not allow an unambiguous conclusions to be drawn on the existence of the dip. A dip in performance was found to be significant in some experiments, but not in others, and in still others a plateau rather than an actual decline in performance was obtained. This inconsistency across the results of studies raises question of whether the appearance of a developmental dip is a genuine and reliable phenomenon. The possibility discussed was that the variability in the size and onset of the dips is an artifact arising from differences in the pubertal status or in the timing of an encoding transition across subjects.