Differential sensitivity to species- and race-based information in the development of attention orienting and attention holding face biases in infancy.

Abstract

Experience-based biases in face processing can reflect both attention orienting biases that support efficient selection of faces from competing stimuli and attention holding biases that allow for detailed encoding of selected faces. It is well established that infants demonstrate both species- and race-based biases in attention holding. Fewer studies have found species-based, but not race-based, orienting biases in infancy but these studies examined species- and race-based biases separately and measured overall orienting without examining attention to distractors. The present study directly compared 6- and 11-month-old infants' species- and race-based biases in attention holding and orienting to faces. We measured infants' duration of looking and frequency/speed of orienting to own-race, other-race, and monkey faces in multi-item search arrays, and their frequency of orienting to faces and distractors during search. Infants showed expected species- and race-based biases in attention holding but only a species-based bias in overall orienting. However, they also showed reduced orienting to salient distractors in the context of own-race faces. These results suggest that orienting mechanisms mediating face selection are robustly driven by species information while orienting to faces versus distractors during search may also reflect prior learning about frequently experienced own-race faces.