The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural informationin this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adultsneeded to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participantsneeded to recognize the emotion displayed by the top half of an upright or upside-down face that was orwas not aligned with a bottom half that displayed another emotion. The results showed that the ability torecognize facial emotion develops with age, with a developmental course that depends on the emotion tobe recognized. Moreover, children at all ages and adults exhibited both an inversion effect and a compositeeffect, suggesting that children rely on configural information to recognize facial emotions.

Four-month-old infants were habituated with an upright or an upside-down face. Eye-movement recordings showed that the upright and upside-down faces were not explored the same way. Infants spent more time exploring internal features, mainly in the region of the nose and mouth, when the face was upright. They also alternated as frequently between the face's internal features (eyes vs. nose/mouth) as between external and internal features. When the face was upside down, the infants spent half of their time exploring external features, and preferentially alternated between external features and internal features. The main effect of inversion was a decrease of the looking time to the nose/mouth region and of the number of shifts between the eye region and the nose/mouth region.

Two experiments were carried out to study the role of gender category in evaluations of face distinctiveness. In Experiment 1, participants had to evaluate the distinctiveness and the femininity-masculinity of real or artificial composite faces. The composite faces were created by blending either faces of the same gender (sexed composite faces, approximating the sexed prototypes) or faces of both genders (nonsexed composite faces, approximating the face prototype). The results show that the distinctiveness ratings decreased as the number of blended faces increased. Distinctiveness and gender ratings did not covary for real faces or sexed composite faces, but they did vary for nonsexed composite faces. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to state which of two composite faces, one sexed and one nonsexed, was more distinctive. Sexed composite faces were selected less often. The results are interpreted as indicating that distinctiveness is based on sexed prototypes. Implications for face recognition models are discussed.

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