title: Attentional prioritization of infant faces is limited to own-race infants.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Recent evidence indicates that infant faces capture attention automatically, presumably to elicit caregiving behavior from adults and leading to greater probability of progeny survival. Elsewhere, evidence demonstrates that people show deficiencies in the processing of other-race relative to own-race faces. We ask whether this other-race effect impacts on attentional attraction to infant faces. Using a dot-probe task to reveal the spatial allocation of attention, we investigate whether other-race infants capture attention.
  
  
  RESULTS
  South Asian and White participants (young adults aged 18-23 years) responded to a probe shape appearing in a location previously occupied by either an infant face or an adult face; across trials, the race (South Asian/White) of the faces was manipulated. Results indicated that participants were faster to respond to probes that appeared in the same location as infant faces than adult faces, but only on own-race trials.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Own-race infant faces attract attention, but other-race infant faces do not. Sensitivity to face-specific care-seeking cues in other-race kindenschema may be constrained by interracial contact and experience.
authors.affiliation: School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom. John.Hodsoll@gmail.com
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hodsoll
authors.forename: Kimberly A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Quinn
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hodsoll
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology; D055815:Young Adult
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