Where do our practices of interpreting and attending to the visual world come from? In this talk, I will discuss two lines of research that address this broad question in different ways. In the first project, I will describe young children's (3 to 5-year-olds) striking deficit in recognizing two-tone / Mooney-type images. These images are trivial for adults to recognize with a sufficient cue, such as the original photograph from which the two-tone was derived. We also find that adults from a remote Amazonian tribe (Piraha) show a similar deficit, and that when the need to comprehend the referential relationship between the two-tone and photos is removed, children's recognition improves. This suggests the phenomenon is related to visual symbolic expertise (c.f., DeLoache), rather than the consequence of an immature visual system. In a separate line of research, I will discuss individual differences in viewing an important social stimulus: the human face. We measured participants' self-reported degree of autism-associated traits, and also collected eye-tracking data as they watched a video of a person speaking under two conditions: (1) gaze directed at the participant, (2) gaze averted. We found that individual differences in the level of self-reported autistic-like traits predicted different levels of direct gaze reciprocation (greater gaze to eye region in the direct vs the averted condition), perhaps an indication of the importance of nonconscious gaze mimcry in successful social interactions.