The Other-Race Effect Develops During Infancy

Abstract

Experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing. In the study reported here, we investigated how faces observed within the visual environment affect the development of the face-processing system during the 1st year of life. We assessed 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants' ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group and within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese). The 3-month-old infants demonstrated recognition in all conditions, the 6-month-old infants were able to recognize Caucasian and Chinese faces only, and the 9-month-old infants' recognition was restricted to own-race faces. The pattern of preferences indicates that the other-race effect is emerging by 6 months of age and is present at 9 months of age. The findings suggest that facial input from the infant's visual environment is crucial for shaping the face-processing system early in infancy, resulting in differential recognition accuracy for faces of different races in adulthood.Human adults are experts at recognizing faces of conspecifics and appear to perform this task effortlessly. Despite this impressive ability, however, adults are more susceptible to recognition errors when a target face is from an unfamiliar racial group, rather than their own racial group. This phenomenon is known as the other-race effect (ORE; see Meissner & Brigham, 2001, for a review). Although the ORE has been widely reported, the exact mechanisms that underlie reduced recognition accuracy for other-race faces, and precisely when this effect emerges during development, remain unclear.The ORE can be explained in terms of a modifiable face representation. The concept of a multidimensional face-space architecture, first proposed by Valentine (1991), has received much empirical support. According to the norm-based coding model, individual face exemplars are represented as vectors within face-space according to their deviation from a prototypical average. The prototype held by each person represents the average of all faces that person has ever encoded and is therefore unique. Although it is unclear which dimensions are most salient and used for recognition, it is likely that dimensions vary between individuals and possibly within each person over time. The prototype (and therefore

Eye contrast polarity is critical for face recognition by infants

“…The development of face perception and recognition during infancy has been studied extensively including both the role of experience (Kelly et al, 2007;Kelly et al, 2009;Pascalis, de Haan, & Nelson, 2002) and the aspects of visual information that infants use (Bhatt, Bertin, Hayden, & Reed, 2005;Cohen & Cashone, 2001;Hyden, Bhatt, Reed, Corbly, & Joseph, 2007;Quinn & Tanaka, 2009). However, there are relatively few studies testing the effect of contrast polarity of faces in infants.…”

“…We tested 7-to 8-month old infants as, by this age infants have developed an advantage associated with recognition of human faces (Pascalis et al, 2002), and for own ethnic group faces (Own-race advantage: Kelly et al, 2007;Kelly et al, 2009). At a similar age, sensitivity to the normal range of human facial feature sizes also develops (Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2012).…”

“Are you looking at me?” How children’s gaze judgments improve with age.

“…For example, adults and children display an "other-race effect" (poorer at making judgments in other races), which can affect how they look at faces (e.g. Kelly et al 2007;Fu et al 2012;Suhrke et al 2014). A similar effect has also been shown with age; faces similar in age to ones own receive more attention than those of a dissimilar age (Ebner at al.…”

Cultural neuroscience and the category of race: the case of the other-race effect

“…Some of these studies focus on differences in the processing and interpretation of information between the representatives of different races. Most of them are studies based on the achievements of the neuroscience of race, dealing with such phenomena as the other-race effect (ORE) (Ito and Bartholow 2009;Kelly et al 2007a), ingroup favouritism (Brewer 2007), judging mental states and activating attitudes (e.g. empathizing with one's own-and other-group members) (Marsh et al 2003;Xu et al 2009).…”

“…An example of a broader cognitive mechanism responsible for the occurrence of ORE is perceptual narrowing or perceptual expertise (Kelly et al 2007a;Nelson 2001). Simply defined, it is based on the fact that in the course of their ontogeny, people have become experts in recognising objects that often appear in their environment.…”