Visual selective attention biases contribute to the other-race effect among 9-month-old infants.
During the first year of life, infants maintain their ability to discriminate faces from their own race but become less able to differentiate other-race faces. Though this is likely due to daily experience with own-race faces, the mechanisms linking repeated exposure to optimal face processing remain unclear. One possibility is that frequent experience with own-race faces generates a selective attention bias to these faces. Selective attention elicits enhancement of attended information and suppression of distraction to improve visual processing of attended objects. Thus attention biases to own-race faces may boost processing and discrimination of these faces relative to other-race faces. We used a spatial cueing task to bias attention to own- or other-race faces among Caucasian 9-month-old infants. Infants discriminated faces in the focus of the attention bias, regardless of race, indicating that infants remained sensitive to differences among other-race faces. Instead, efficacy of face discrimination reflected the extent of attention engagement.
Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. jmarkant@tulane.edu.
Julie
J
Markant
The Center for Mind and Brain and Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA.
Lisa M
LM
Oakes
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI.
Dima
D
Amso
D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D044469:Racial Groups / Q000523:psychology*
face perception; infancy; other-race effect; perceptual narrowing; selective attention