Infants’ Individuation of Faces based on Gender and Race

• In Event: 1-032 - Infants’ capacity to individuate people

Integrative Statement

Over their first year of life infants’ perceptual discrimination abilities become finely tuned to the faces they most frequently see. However, very little is known about how this tuning affects infants’ conceptual representations of individuals from different social groups. We know that infants possess broad categories of faces and represent human faces as a distinct ‘kind’ from non-human animals (Bonatti et al., 2002), but do infants also have finer-grained social categories of human faces? Our proposed talk will describe a recent series of studies addressing this question by assessing infants’ individuation of human faces that vary by gender and race. We also examine how the demographic representation available in infants’ experience might influence their kind-based representations of human faces.

The current work tested 12- and 24-month-old infants in an individuation box reaching task (e.g., Van de Walle et al., 2000) that involved seeing small graspable faces entering in and out of a box. The infants were then encouraged to reach into the box and retrieve the number of faces they believed were contained inside. What varied across conditions was how the faces differed from one another within a trial; faces varied by humanness (human faces vs. geometric patterns), gender (male or female), or race (Caucasian or African-American) (see figure 1). Since the number of faces contained within the box were otherwise ambiguous during each trial, this task assesses whether infants can use the property differences between different sets of faces to represent the number of individuals that exist in the event. If infants perceive the contrasting facial features as diagnostic of distinct individuals they should reach in the box more often.

In the Humanness Condition, we found that both 12- and 24-month-old infants displayed significantly longer reaching, consistent with representing two hidden faces. This pattern of reaching was found regardless of whether it was a Caucasian or African-American exemplar contrasted with ‘non-human’ stimuli. In the Gender Condition we found that 24- but not 12-month-old infants used the differences between the male and female faces to represent a greater number of individuals. However, in the Race Condition there were no significant increases in reaching after seeing contrasts between Caucasian and African-American faces. Interestingly, preliminary data reveals that 24-month-old infants identified as being racially non-Caucasian exhibit greater reaching in the Race Condition, suggesting they might be more sensitive to the contrast between such features.

Together, our results replicate and extend human-kind individuation studies by providing evidence that infants use finer-grained face information to construct representations of new individuals. Our data suggests that markers of social categories are not only perceptually salient for infants, but might also be conceptually meaningful. Additionally, we present preliminary evidence that suggests the demographics of one’s environment shapes which facial features are used to individuate people. The current findings support our understanding of how infants begin to conceptually represent gender and race differences as identity-defining variations. This stage in development may signify as a starting point for social biases that are observed later in development.

Authors

• Charisse B Pickron, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Erik W Cheries, University of Massachusets at Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author