How Infants Learn From a World of Faces: Implications for Racial Biases and Mask-Wearing

Abstract

Faces are special to infants from birth, and experiences with faces in infancy are critical to developing brain circuits that support face processing skills through adulthood. Infants learn to extract rich information from faces, including recognizing people, tracking their gaze and expressions, and lip-reading. As infants learn to interact with the people around them, their responses to and understanding of these communicative facial cues become more connected to their social understanding and reflect their developmental context. Infants’ face perception is particularly responsive to experience, with some degree of plasticity present through middle childhood. Opportunities to interact with people from diverse racial backgrounds in infancy may help prevent perceptual and social biases toward different groups. Variations in experience with faces beyond face race and gender, such as the use of face coverings, may impact how and what infants learn from faces.

Effects of environmental diversity on exploration and learning: The case of bilingualism.

“…At an individual and/or social level, racial or gender diversity can introduce a broader range of social categories in a learner’s environment. In a recent example, the coronavirus disease pandemic may have increased complexity of the social visual environment by introducing a wider variety of ways in which speech is presented given variable use of face coverings (Bayet, 2022; DeBolt & Oakes, 2023; Singh & Quinn, 2023; Singh et al, 2021b). In this way, it is not clear to what extent effects of linguistic complexity are unique in their impact on behavior.…”

Community diversity and the other-race effect in infancy

“…Experiences begin shaping these preferences as early as 3 months of age when infants have demonstrated increased attention toward faces of their own race in preferential-looking paradigms (Kelly et al, 2005 ; Marquis and Sugden, 2019 ). Because infants are primarily exposed to the face of their primary caregiver, who is most often an adult female of their own race, this archetype may form the basis by which narrowing recognition abilities and visual preference for age, gender, and race occur (Macchi Cassia et al, 2014 ; Sugden and Moulson, 2019 ; Bayet, 2022 ). Evidence from these preferential-looking paradigms may be explained by the emergence of advantaged face processing for own-race faces (Liu et al, 2015 ; Fassbender et al, 2016 ; Quinn et al, 2019 ).…”