Poster #195 - Perception of Looming Black & White Faces in 6-to-11-Year-Olds

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

To examine the effects of threat and perception of own-and-other-race faces, we utilized a visual looming paradigm followed by the child-friendly race Implicit Association Task (IAT; Baron & Banaji, 2006). Utilizing the IAT with the looming task allowed an initial analysis of the effects of racial stereotypes on spatial perception and looming visual threats. Building upon previous findings that demonstrated evolutionarily threatening stimuli (e.g., spiders & snakes) caused an underestimation in time to contact relative to less threatening stimuli (Vagnoli, Lourenco, & Longo, 2012), we utilized black and white children’s faces to determine if we would see an effect of threat based on racial stereotypes.

By using the same protocol from the spatial literature with 6-11-year-old children, the present study allows for a critical developmental analysis of threat perception and race. Newborn infants do not have a preference for faces of particular races but by 3 months of experience with primarily own race faces induces a preference for those faces (Kelly et al., 2005; Kinzler & Spelke, 2011). By 3 years of age children show a bias for their own race and their own sex (About, 1988), but more generalized biases in favor of one's own group membership emerge much later in childhood and become adult-like around age 5 (Baron & Banaji, 2006). We aim to determine the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon & see if this automatic response maps onto the behavioral research on the ages at which racial bias emerges across a diverse sample.

In the present study, participants made time-to- contact judgments of looming visual stimuli that expanded in size over one second before disappearing from the screen. Participants (N=30) were instructed to imagine each stimulus continuing to approach after it disappeared and to judge when it would have collided with them by pressing the space bar at that exact moment. Starting image size varied to simulate differences in starting distance so that actual time to contact was not correlated with the size of the image at the final frame. Participants completed 8 blocks with 40 trials each (total of 320 trials). Each block contained a randomized order of trials with a random inter-trial interval of 300-800ms.

Although data collection is still ongoing, preliminary analyses showed a main effect of category for the race of the faces that varied by age. The 6-7-year old’s did not respond differently to the faces based on expansion rate or starting image size. The 8-9-year old’s did respond differently to the expansion rates of the faces but not the size of the faces. The 10-11-year-olds did respond differently based on both the expansion rates and the sizes of the faces. These findings suggest a potential protracted development in the distance perception in looming faces which may relate to the social information provided by those images. IAT scores also differed by age with the 6-7-year-olds and the 8-9-year-olds showing a slight white bias and the 10-11-year-olds showing a moderate black bias (See Figure). These implicit bias scores did not relate to space perception.

Authors

• Maria Jones, Emory University
  Presenting Author

• Philippe Rochat, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author