Functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex. This challenge can be addressed by identifying channels of interest in individual participants, and then testing the reliability of those channels' response profiles in independent data. Using this approach, cortical regions with preferential responses to faces versus scenes, and to scenes versus faces, were observed reliably in both adults and infants. By contrast, standard analysis techniques did not reliably identify significant responses to both categories in either age group. These results reveal scene‐responsive regions, and confirm face‐responsive regions, in preverbal infants. More generally, the analysis approach will be a robust and sensitive tool for future characterization of the early functional development of the human brain. Two experiments demonstrate that the analysis of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data is substantially improved by the identification of individual functional channels of interest (fCOIs). Using this method, we identified regions of temporal and occipital cortex with reliable preferences for both faces and scenes in infants under 1 year of age.