Poster #58 - Infants Learned the Prototype of Other-race Faces but not That of Own-race Faces

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Our perceptual abilities undergo rapid development in the first year. Prior research focusing on face perception has revealed its development largely driven by infants’ perceptual experiences. For example, young infants can recognize faces of various social categories equally well, but older infants showed decreased recognition performance for unfamiliar faces, such as other-race and other-species faces (for a review see Maurer & Werker, 2014).

To study infants’ face perception abilities, previous work has primarily concentrated on how infants differentiate one face from another one (i.e., perceptual discrimination). However, to our knowledge, the ability to perceive commonality across faces has received less attention. To this end, we used an implicit learning task to examine infants’ ability to form perceptual prototypes of own- and other-race faces.

Twenty-four (4- to 13-month, 14 females) White infants participated in the current study. They first watched a series of 12 faces (3 seconds/face) in the learning phase. Each of these faces were created by morphing one unique face with a prototype face at 50%-50% ratio. Thus, these faces shared perceptual commonality of the prototype face. To probe if infants learned the face prototype, in the following test phase, we presented the prototype face with a novel face (5 seconds for 2 trials). If infants can learn the face prototype, they should treat the prototype face as familiar and show a visual preference for the novel face (i.e., novelty preference).

The study included an own-race Caucasian face block and an other-race Asian face block in counterbalanced order. The study was conducted online. Infants’ looking behaviors were recorded via Zoom and coded manually.

As shown in Figure 1, in the own-race condition, infants’ novel preference (46%) was not significantly different from the chance level (50%, one-sample t-test, p = .102). By contrast, the same infants exhibited a strong novelty preference in the other-race condition (55%, p = .042). Moreover, we found that the novelty preference for other-race faces was significantly larger than that for own-race faces (paired-sample t-test, p = .013).

The contrast between the own- and other-race faces suggests the role of experience in modulating the development of face perception in infancy: when presented with other-race faces, infants learn the prototype of the category, consistent with processing these faces at a categorical level. When presented with own-race faces, the null result is more difficult to interpret, but it is consistent with the possibility that the infants were encoding these faces as individual exemplars. The overall findings are in line with those found in children and adults (e.g., Ge et al., 2009; Woo et al., 2020), and indicate a shift in visual encoding processes shaped by visual experience. A tendency to represent other-race faces as category prototypes and own-race faces as individual exemplars may contribute to the development of race-related social biases early in life (e.g., Setoh et al., 2019).

Our ongoing efforts include recruiting a cohort of Asian infants to determine the role of experience and performing a control experiment to ensure infants could discriminate the other-race faces.

Authors

• Elysha Elaine Springer, McMaster University
  Presenting Author

• Wei Fang, McMaster University

• Carie Guan, McMaster University

• Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware

• Linlin Yan, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University

• Naiqi G Xiao, McMaster University