title: How race and age experiences shape young children's face processing abilities.
abstract: Despite recent advances in research on race and age biases, the question of how race and age experiences combine to affect young children's face perception remains unexplored. To fill this gap, the current study tested two ethnicities of 3-year-old children using a combined cross-race/cross-age design. Caucasian children with and without older siblings and Mainland Chinese children without older siblings were tested for their ability to discriminate adult and child Caucasian faces as well as adult and child Asian faces in both upright and inverted orientations. Children of both ethnicities manifested an own-race bias, which was confined to adult faces, and an adult face bias, which was confined to own-race faces. Likewise, sibling experience affected Caucasian children's processing of own-race child faces, but this effect did not generalize to other-race faces. Results suggest that race and age information are represented at the same hierarchical level in young children's memory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy. Electronic address: viola.macchicassia@unimib.it.
authors.forename: Viola
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Macchi Cassia
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Southwest University, Beibei, Chongqing 400715, China.
authors.forename: Lizhu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Antonella
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pisacane
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, Liaoning 116029, China.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2X2, Canada.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D044466:Asian People / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D035781:Siblings / Q000523:psychology; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data
keywords: Children; Face perception; Inversion effect; Other-age effect; Other-race effect; Own-age bias; Own-race bias; Sibling experience