Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants

By Gizelle Anzures, Andrea Wheeler, Paul C. Quinn, O. Pascalis, A. Slater, Michelle Heron-Delaney, James W. Tanaka, Kang Lee. 2012

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins in infancy. The present study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants’ visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate between novel and familiarized Asian faces at the beginning of testing were given brief daily experience with Asian female faces in the experimental condition and Caucasian female faces in the control condition. At the end of three weeks, only infants who received daily experience with Asian females showed above-chance recognition of novel Asian female and male faces. Further, infants in the experimental condition showed greater efficiency in learning novel Asian females compared to infants in the control condition. Thus, visual experience with a novel stimulus category can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing in infancy via improved stimulus recognition and encoding.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Early Experience & Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing (2014, background): “That is, infants who are given extra exposure to other-race faces while narrowing is in progress continue to discriminate other-race faces (Anzures et al., 2012).”