Editorial: Face Perception across the Life-Span

Faces convey information that is of great importance for humans as social beings. The ability to process information from faces undergoes significant changes across the life-span (e.g., Germine et al., 2011), and shows considerable individual differences (e.g., Wilhelm et al., 2010). Average developmental trends and changes of individual differences in face perception across the life-span arise from multiple components. These include sensory (e.g., holistic, configural, and feature based perception), cognitive (e.g., memory, processing speed, attentional control) and emotion related (e.g., identifying facial expression) processing domains. Because our understanding of rather isolated functional domains involved in face perception was growing during the last decades of research, for the present research topic we called for multi-component approaches toward an integrated view on facial information processing.We anticipated that such an approachmay help to better describe how the multifaceted facial processing ability is composed and how the components relate to each other. Thus, we aimed to bring together a collection of papers to provide a shot of the current state of the art in developmental research that illustrate actual trends at theorizing and investigating the components of face processing in the context of related abilities. We were open for submissions focusing on average life-span trends, on changes of individual differences, or both. Nineteen successfully published submissions contributed to this aim. Their findings suggest that faces are a special object category in many respects. In the Editorial, we aim at an integrated view of these contributions. Several papers link findings on different facial information processing abilities, and illuminate their relationships with other cognitive and socio-emotional ability domains in age heterogeneous samples. We will first give an overview of the papers published in the research topic, integrate their findings and derive conclusions for future life-span research on multiple components of face perception.