In the visual perception literature, the recognition of faces has often been contrastedudwith that of non-face objects, in terms of differences with regard to the role of parts,udpart relations and holistic processing. However, recent evidence from developmentaludstudies has begun to blur this sharp distinction. We review evidence for a protracteduddevelopment of object recognition that is reminiscent of the well-documented slowudmaturation observed for faces. The prolonged development manifests itself in a retardedudprocessing of metric part relations as opposed to that of individual parts and offersudsurprising parallels to developmental accounts of face recognition, even though theudinterpretation of the data is less clear with regard to holistic processing. We concludeudthat such results might indicate functional commonalities between the mechanismsudunderlying the recognition of faces and non-face objects, which are modulated byuddifferent task requirements in the two stimulus domains.
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