How face patches — areas of cortex that process visual faces — develop is not known. Livingstone and colleagues reared three macaques for 200 days without any visual exposure to faces and used functional MRI to measure neural responses to images of faces, objects and hands. Face-deprived monkeys did not develop normal face patches but showed stronger neural and behavioural selectivity for images of hands than did control monkeys, suggesting that visual experience of faces is necessary for the proper development of face patches.