Early deprivation in audition can have striking effects on the development of visual processing. Here we investigated whether early deafness induces changes in holistic/configural face processing. To this end, we compared the results of a group of early deaf participants to those of a group of hearing participants in an inversion-matching task (Experiment 1) and a composite face task (Experiment 2). We hypothesized that deaf individuals would show an enhanced inversion effect and/or an increased composite face effect compared to hearing controls in case of enhanced holistic/configural face processing. Conversely, these effects would be reduced if they rely more on facial features than hearing controls. As a result, we found that deaf individuals showed an increased inversion effect for faces, but not for non-face objects. They were also significantly slower than hearing controls to match inverted faces. However, the two populations did not differ regarding the overall size of their composite face effect. Altogether these results suggest that early deafness does not enhance or reduce the amount of holistic/configural processing devoted to faces but may increase the dependency on this mode of processing.

Studies with adults have found a left bias in their perception of faces, which suggests a right hemisphere specialisation in processing facial information. Hemispheric asymmetry is observed during the first year of life but it is still unclear at what age such specialisation becomes adult-like during the prolonged period of face-processing development through childhood. In the present study we investigated the development of children's perceptions of gender and emotion using chimeric faces. Our results demonstrate that a right hemisphere bias, similar to that found in adults, is observed from 5 years of age. The results are discussed within a framework of developmental studies and we conclude that although children may be less efficient than adults at encoding faces, their basic manner of encoding is not fundamentally different from that of adults.