Johnson and Morton (1991. Biology and Cognitive Development: The Case of Face Recognition. Blackwell, Oxford) used Gabriel Horn's work on the filial imprinting model to inspire a two-process theory of the development of face processing in humans. In this paper we review evidence accrued over the past two decades from infants and adults, and from other primates, that informs this two-process model. While work with newborns and infants has been broadly consistent with predictions from the model, further refinements and questions have been raised. With regard to adults, we discuss more recent evidence on the extension of the model to eye contact detection, and to subcortical face processing, reviewing functional imaging and patient studies. We conclude with discussion of outstanding caveats and future directions of research in this field.

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Human faces under natural illumination, and human eyes in their unique morphology, include specific contrast polarity relations that face-detection mechanisms could capitalise on. Newborns have been shown to preferentially orient to simple face-like patterns only when they contain face- or gaze-relevant contrast. We investigated whether human adults show similar preferential orienting towards schematic face-like stimuli, and whether this effect depends on the contrast polarity of the stimuli. In two experiments we demonstrate that upright schematic face-like patterns elicit faster eye movements in adult humans than inverted ones, and that this occurs only if they contain face- or gaze-relevant contrast information in the whole stimulus or in the eye region only. These results suggest that primitive mechanisms underlying the orienting bias towards faces and eyes influence and modulate social cognition not just in infants but in adults as well.