1-032 - Infants’ capacity to individuate people

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

From early on, infants become experts in processing faces, especially those common in their social environment (Kelly et al., 2007). In a sense, infants might retain a capacity to individuate those similar to them, but lose it in regard to those different from them – a possibility with potential implications for the development of intergroup attitudes and biases. This proposed symposium will present three papers addressing this intriguing and novel possibility. Adopting a box-reaching paradigm, Paper 1 examines whether 12- and 24-month-olds individuate faces based on humanness, gender, and race. The findings reveal that humanness is relied on for individuation by 12-months, gender only by 24-months, and race only by non-Caucasian 24-month-olds. Paper 2 examines whether attaching salient emotional expressions to other-race faces facilitates individuation. Indeed, whereas 6-month-old Caucasian infants were incapable of discriminating between neutral Asian faces, they did so when the Asian faces were happy or angry. Paper 3 exposed 12-month-olds to individuals from with made-up in- and out-groups, and thus neutralized experiential familiarity. Here, infants looked longer at a display of one person when two were supposed to be present, when the people were in-groups than when they were out-groups. The Discussant is a well-known cognitive scientists who has written extensively on the conceptual implications of dual-representations of entities; i.e., as individual instances vs as kinds. He will integrate the three papers, and describe further implications of the findings.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Gil Diesendruck, Bar-Ilan University

Discussant

• Sandeep Prasada, Hunter College

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ Individuation of Faces based on Gender and Race - Presenting Author: Charisse B Pickron, University of Minnesota; Non-Presenting Author: Erik W Cheries, University of Massachusets at Amherst

• Can Emotional Expressions “Motivate” Infants to Individuate Other-Race Faces in Infants Following Perceptual Narrowing? - Presenting Author: Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware; Non-Presenting Author: Kang Lee, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Olivier Pascalis, Universite Grenoble Alpes; Non-Presenting Author: Naiqi G Xiao, Princeton University

• Infants’ Intergroup Bias in Individuation - Presenting Author: Adi Fogiel, Bar-Ilan University; Non-Presenting Author: Jonas Hermes, University of Goettingen; Non-Presenting Author: Tanya Behne, University of Goettingen; Non-Presenting Author: Hannes Rakoczy, University of Gottingen; Non-Presenting Author: Gil Diesendruck, Bar-Ilan University