In his 1872 monograph, Charles Darwin posited that "… the habit of expressing our feelings by certain movements, though now rendered innate, had been in some manner gradually acquired." ¹ Nearly 150 years later, researchers are still teasing apart innate versus experience-dependent contributions to expression recognition. Indeed, studies have shown that face detection is surprisingly resilient to early visual deprivation, ² ^, ³ ^, ⁴ ^, ⁵ pointing to plasticity that extends beyond dogmatic critical periods. ⁶ ^, ⁷ ^, ⁸ However, it remains unclear whether such resilience extends to downstream processing, such as the ability to recognize facial expressions. The extent to which innate versus experience-dependent mechanisms contribute to this ability has yet to be fully explored. ⁹ ^, ¹⁰ ^, ¹¹ ^, ¹² ^, ¹³ To investigate the impact of early visual experience on facial-expression recognition, we studied children with congenital cataracts who have undergone sight-correcting treatment ¹⁴ ^, ¹⁵ and tracked their longitudinal skill acquisition as they gain sight late in life. We introduce and explore two potential facilitators of late-life plasticity: the availability of newborn-like coarse visual acuity prior to treatment ¹⁶ and the privileged role of motion following treatment. ⁴ ^, ¹⁷ ^, ¹⁸ We find that early visual deprivation does not preclude partial acquisition of facial-expression recognition. While rudimentary pretreatment vision is sufficient to allow a low level of expression recognition, it does not facilitate post-treatment improvements. Additionally, only children commencing vision with high visual acuity privilege the use of dynamic cues. We conclude that skipping typical visual experience early in development and introducing high-resolution imagery late in development restricts, but does not preclude, facial-expression skill acquisition and that the representational mechanisms driving this learning differ from those that emerge during typical visual development.