Visual selective attention biases contribute to the other‐race effect among 9‐month‐old infants

Abstract

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.

Scanning of own‐ versus other‐race faces in infants from racially diverse or homogenous communities

“…For example, Caucasian adults’ recognition of unfamiliar Black faces can be enhanced by cueing their attention to regions high diagnostic values (Hills & Lewis, ). Similarly, Markant, Oakes, and Amso () found that Caucasian infants could be biased to discriminate between individual Caucasian or individual African American faces by manipulating them to attend to faces of one race versus the other; in this paradigm, Caucasian infants showed superior discrimination for the face race that they attended, and not necessarily the familiar own‐race, Caucasian faces. It is possible that differences in the kinds of faces infants encounter every day (i.e., their community face experience) cause them to engage their attention differently when shown own‐ versus other‐race faces, and as a result they process and learn differently about those faces.…”

Preferential attention to same‐and other‐ethnicity infant faces does not fully overcome the other‐race effect

“…The visual processing of attended information can be improved by manipulating one's selective attention (Markant et al, ). This heightened processing not only includes improved quality of vision, but enhanced acuity and contrast sensitivity to the selected stimuli (Carrasco, ), enhancing the encoding and recognition of the attended stimuli, relative to the unattended stimuli (Rutman, Clapp, Chadick, & Gazzaley, ).…”

The Relation between Infant Covert Orienting, Sustained Attention and Brain Activity

“…Thus, the finding of the validity effect in the ventral temporal regions in addition to the occipital ROIs suggests that shifting attention to a valid location enhances not only visual processing of basic information (e.g., color, brightness) but also high-level visual processing (e.g., object identification). Recent studies have highlighted the interactions between infant spatial attention and social perception of faces (Hayden, Bhatt, Kangas, Zieber, & Joseph, 2012; Markant et al, 2015), eye gaze (Farroni et al, 2004; Reid, Striano, Kaufman, & Johnson, 2004), and human biomechanical motion (Daum & Gredeback, 2011, Rohlfing, Longo, & Bertenthal, 2012). For instance, Daum and Gredeback (2011) investigated how the observed goal-directed manual grasping actions modulated the infants’ spatial attention in a modified spatial cueing paradigm.…”

“…The cue was presented for 300 ms and then turned off. The central stimulus was frozen when the cue was presented in order to reduce the possibility of infants moving their eyes toward the cue before the target onset (e.g., Richards, 2005; Markant, Oakes, & Amso, 2015). After the cue was turned off, the fixation stimulus was left on the screen for 150 ms in the short SOA condition and 1050 ms in the long SOA condition.…”