Abstract
The other-race effect (ORE) can be described as difficulties in discriminating between faces of ethnicities other than one’s own, and can already be observed at approximately 9 months of age. Recent studies also showed that infants visually explore same-and other-race faces differently. However, it is still unclear whether infants’ looking behavior for same- and other-race faces is related to their face discrimination abilities. To investigate this question we conducted a habituation–dishabituation experiment to examine Caucasian 9-month-old infants’ gaze behavior, and their discrimination of same- and other-race faces, using eye-tracking measurements. We found that infants looked longer at the eyes of same-race faces over the course of habituation, as compared to other-race faces. After habituation, infants demonstrated a clear other-race effect by successfully discriminating between same-race faces, but not other-race faces. Importantly, the infants’ ability to discriminate between same-race faces significantly correlated with their fixation time towards the eyes of same-race faces during habituation. Thus, our findings suggest that for infants old enough to begin exhibiting the ORE, gaze behavior during habituation is related to their ability to differentiate among same-race faces, compared to other-race faces.
Highlights
The other race effect (ORE) begins to manifest during the first year of life, and is characterized by less efficient processing of faces from ethnicities that one does not have sufficient exposure to, when compared to faces from their own ethnicity
The first ANOVA was conducted on the number of trials that the infants saw during habituation, and we found no significant effect of stimulus-race condition, F(1, 66) = 0.636, p = 0.428, indicating that the infants saw a similar number of habituation trials in the same-race and other-race conditions (M = 8.12 vs. M = 8.71, respectively)
Our results agreed with previous infant studies that showed that there is a connection In our study, we found that longer proportional total dwell time on the eyes areas of of interest interest (AOIs) during habituation between infants’ gaze behavior while encoding faces and their performance in recognizing faces
Summary
The other race effect (ORE) begins to manifest during the first year of life, and is characterized by less efficient processing of faces from ethnicities that one does not have sufficient exposure to, when compared to faces from their own ethnicity (for a review, see [1]). During the first year of life there is a sensitive period when the face recognition system is exposed to inputs consisting of many exemplars of faces [6]. These inputs are thought to calibrate the face recognition system such that the infant begins to examine faces in an optimal way, for distinguishing faces matching the template of the initial calibrating sample. Given that infants have been shown to predominantly see same-race faces [7], this input might tune the face perception system towards the optimal perception of same-race faces.
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