Development of the other-race effect during infancy: Evidence toward universality?

By D. Kelly, Shaoying Liu, Kang Lee, Paul C. Quinn, O. Pascalis, A. Slater, Liezhong Ge. 2009

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The other-race effect in face processing develops within the first year of life in Caucasian infants. It is currently unknown whether the developmental trajectory observed in Caucasian infants can be extended to other cultures. This is an important issue to investigate because recent findings from cross-cultural psychology have suggested that individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds tend to perceive the world in fundamentally different ways. To this end, the current study investigated 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Chinese infants’ ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group and within two other racial groups (African and Caucasian). The 3-month-olds demonstrated recognition in all conditions, whereas the 6-month-olds recognized Chinese faces and displayed marginal recognition for Caucasian faces but did not recognize African faces. The 9-month-olds’ recognition was limited to Chinese faces. This pattern of development is consistent with the perceptual narrowing hypothesis that our perceptual systems are shaped by experience to be optimally sensitive to stimuli most commonly encountered in one’s unique cultural environment.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Early Experience & Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing (2014, background): “, 2007), that it is independent of culture (Kelly et al., 2009), and that Developmental Psychobiology Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing 9”
The Development of the Uncanny Valley in Infants (2011, background): “…the faces of other races (Chiroro & Valentine, 1995)—have found that young infants can discriminate the faces of different races but that older infants only discriminate the faces of their own race (Kelly et al., 2005; Kelly et al., 2007; Kelly et al., 2009; Sangrigoli & de Schonen, 2004).”
Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants (2012, unknown): “However, 3-month-olds’ face recognition abilities tend to be more broadly tuned compared with older infants (Kelly et al., 2007, 2009).”