The present research examines visual perception of emotion in both typical and atypical development. To examine the processes by which perceptual mechanisms become attuned to the contingencies of affective signals in the environment, the authors measured the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. To evaluate the role of experience, they compared typically developing children with physically abused children, who were presumed to have experienced high levels of threat and hostility. As predicted, physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls, which suggests that physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger. The findings are discussed in terms of experiential processes in perceptual learning. Humans rely heavily on facial expressions when communicating emotional states to others. Although considerable attention has been devoted to how the nervous system responds to faces as compared with other objects (McCarthy, Puce, Gore, & Allison, 1997; Moscovitch, Winocur, & Behrmann, 1997), there are still many questions about factors that affect the perception of emotion- specific information communicated by the face. Because emotions are signaled as continuous sequences of changes in facial muscu- lature, rapid, accurate recognition of facial expressions of emotion presents a significant computational processing achievement for the developing child. To correctly identify an emotion, an observer must use early partial information from a dynamic modulation of muscle movements to generate hypotheses about what emotion is being displayed and then map those changing physical features onto categories to label, categorize, and predict the behavior of