Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The face is a central communication channel providing infor-mation about the identities of our interaction partners and theirpotential mental states expressed by motor configurations. Al-though it is well known that infants ability to recognise peoplefollows a developmental process, it is still an open questionhow face identity recognition skills can develop and, in par-ticular, how facial expression and identity processing poten-tially interact during this developmental process. We proposethat by acquiring information of the facial motor configurationobserved from face stimuli encountered throughout develop-ment would be sufficient to develop a face-space representa-tion. This representation encodes the observed face stimuli aspoints of a multidimensional psychological space able to as-sist facial identity and expression recognition. We validate ourhypothesis through computational simulations and we suggestpotential implications of this understanding with respect to theavailable findings in face processing.