3-124 - The Specificity of Face-Trait Inferences in Infants and Children

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Adults make judgments about others’ traits based on their facial appearance (e.g., Todorov, 2017). Although this is a ubiquitous phenomenon in adults, very little work has explored the developmental process by which we come to make these face-trait inferences. This symposium brings together work that examines how infants and children attend to, and evaluate, multiple face cues.

The first paper examines how infants follow the gaze of more or less trustworthy-looking and attractive-looking individuals. Although infants were more likely to follow the gaze of an attractive-looking face, they were more likely to attend to objects to which a trustworthy-looking face had gazed. The second paper explores developmental changes in preschoolers’ use of face cues to infer knowledge. Four-year-olds predicted that a trustworthy-looking individual, not a competent-looking one, would be more knowledgeable, while 5-year-olds appeared to rely on features associated with competence and trustworthiness to predict knowledge. The final paper investigates how face and race cues affect children’s predictions about others. Only after 5 years of age do children use face cues to infer future behavior. Additionally, with age, children begin to take both race and face cues into account when making their inferences.

Collectively, these papers suggest that although very young children rely on face cues to make inferences about others, their sensitivity to more domain-relevant face cues and other competing cues (i.e., race) increases with age.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Carolyn Palmquist, Amherst College

Discussant

• Melissa A Koenig, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota

Individual Presentations

• The Impact of Facial Trustworthiness and Attractiveness on Gaze Processing in 7-month-old Infants - Presenting Author: Sarah Jessen, Department of Neurology, University of Luebeck

• Developmental Change in 4- and 5-year-olds’ Face-Trait Predictions - Presenting Author: Erika DeAngelis, Amherst College; Non-Presenting Author: Carolyn Palmquist, Amherst College; Non-Presenting Author: Erik W Cheries, University of Massachusets at Amherst

• Children’s facial inferences: Behavioral Consequences and Prioritization Over Race Cues - Presenting Author: Tessa E.S. Charlesworth, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Mahzarin R Banaji, Harvard University