Facial attractiveness plays a major role in the formation of interpersonal social judgements. Many studies showed that attractive individuals enjoy advantages over less attractive people. They are perceived as more likeable, kind, and intelligent and are more likely to be professionally successful than their less attractive counterparts. Even children have been shown to be differentially evaluated on the basis of their physical appearance, both by peers and by adults. Facial attractiveness has been demonstrated to influence the status within the peer group as well as evaluation of school performance by teachers.

Such biases in favor of attractive individuals were for a long time thought to be based on prevalent socio-cultural norms. Judgements of attractiveness were viewed as depending largely on fashion and the underlying mechanisms were viewed as being only gradually acquired through internalization of prevalent socio-cultural stereotypes in the course of individual development. Over the past 10 years, however, evidence has accumulated which suggests that the perception of facial attractiveness may be remarkably similar across both different cultures and different age groups. The results of studies examining the influence of the beholder’s age on the perception of facial attractiveness in fact indicate that already children as young as three months old are able to discriminate between rather attractive and unattractive faces. The perception of facial attractiveness, therefore, seems to have a sizeable biological basis and to be not an arbitrary product of social norms. But while matters seem fairly clear at the extremes of the attractiveness continuum, it is much less clear to what degree people at different ages differ in the extent to which they perceive differences between less extreme stimuli and to what degree the type of stimulus and experiential or maturational factors play a role in mediating this ability.

Recent work on the neural mechanisms underlying face processing abilities indicates that maturational factors indeed play a role in several aspects of face processing. For instance, Taylor, McCarthy, Saliba and Degiovanni (1999) demonstrated a gradual maturation for a face-specific electrophysiological component throughout childhood and adolescence. Their study seems remarkable in that it did not involve a specific task which may have confounded face perception with other activities such as recognition or recall but simply compared neural responses when viewing faces with neural responses to other classes of objects in different age groups. On the basis of their result the authors suggest that face processing undergoes a gradual, quantitative maturation but no qualitative change during individual development.

With regard to the processing of facial expression, Kolb, Wilson and Taylor (1992) found that performance levels of eight- to thirteen-year-old children in an expression matching task was similar to the performance of adults with frontal lobe injury, implying that some frontal lobe regions involved in this task may not yet have matured in this age group. In this context, data implicating the left frontal lobe in judgements of facial attractiveness (Nakamura et al., 1998) provide circumstantial evidence to suggest a role of developmental factors in the perception of facial attractiveness, as the frontal lobes are areas in the human brain which are subject to great modifications in the course of individual development.

In cognitive research into the development of face recognition it is widely accepted that faces are a special class of visual objects from the very beginning in that they are preferred by infants over non-faces. However, it is also clear that there is a considerable amount of development involved in the ability to discriminate and recognize faces. A two-process theory has been put forward to account for both these observations in infants and a considerable amount of work has been devoted to investigating the trajectory of face recognition abilities through early and middle childhood into adulthood. The influence of factors such as distinctiveness and inversion on the ability to discriminate and recognize faces at different ages has been examined. The results indicate that children’s face recognition is less disrupted by the inversion of faces than is adults’, that children may be less able to use distinctiveness information in face recognition tasks, and, not surprisingly, that they are less able to correctly identify photographs of a person taken 20 years apart and are more susceptible to being deceived by irrelevant paraphernalia when performing a face recognition task. To account for such observations, Carey (1992) suggested that some of the age-related differences in face processing may be due to the fact that children’s face processing may rely more on isolated features of a face and may tend to disregard the configurational information present in a face. Ellis and Flin (1990), on the other hand, propose that the developmental changes observed are due to the fact that older individuals are simply able to extract more information from a face within a given amount of time.

In view of the above presented evidence for the presence of developmental factors in various aspects of face processing, the comparative paucity of work dealing with the development of mechanisms underlying the perception of facial attractiveness in adults and children at different ages is surprising. While there is a considerable amount of work on infants’ basic abilities and extensive research on the social consequences of an individual’s facial attractiveness, very little is known about the extent to which children’s and adults’ preferences are the same and the extent to which such preferences are modified by the types of stimuli used.

From a developmental point of view it appears possible that, whereas children may prefer faces rated as very attractive by adults over faces rated as quite unattractive, the children’s preferences may be less pronounced than those of the adults, i.e., they may have difficulty perceiving as fine differences in facial attractiveness as adults do. Prior work did not address this point and rather focused on the question of whether children are basically able to make distinctions based on attractiveness, and whether these distinctions are in the same direction as the ones adults make. There is ample evidence that this is already the case at a very early age. But whether the preferences of children are already as pronounced as those of adults is largely unclear. On the basis of the above mentioned neurophysiological data one might expect more pronounced preferences in older subjects on purely brain maturational grounds which, of course, will also be correlated with the experiential factors emerging from cognitive studies. Furthermore, stimulus attributes may play a role in mediating children’s ability to discriminate between attractive and less attractive faces. For example, children may perceive a greater variation in children’s faces than in adults’ faces. This might either be the case because such faces are of greater social importance to them than adults’ faces as attractiveness represents a salient category for social comparison with peers, or because school-age children have comparatively more every-day experience with this type of face. Such an “own-age effect” might be analogous to the well-known “own-race bias”, where it has been demonstrated to be easier for people to recognize members of their own race over members of a different race. With regard to “own-race” effects in the perception of facial attractiveness, recent research has also shown that, while there are great overall consistencies across cultures, the within-culture agreement tends to be somewhat larger than the cross-cultural one. On the other hand, adults may, by virtue of their greater overall experience with all kinds of faces and because of more efficient encoding strategies, perceive a greater variability of attractiveness in both adults’ and children’s faces.