Abstract
Recent studies indicate that a preference for people from one’s own race emerges early in development. Arguably, one potential process contributing to such a bias has to do with the increased discriminability of own- vs. other-race faces–a process commonly attributed to perceptual narrowing of unfamiliar groups’ faces, and analogous to the conceptual homogenization of out-groups. The present studies addressed two implications of perceptual narrowing of other-race faces for infants’ social categorization capacity. In Experiment 1, White 11-month-olds’ (N = 81) looking time at a Black vs. White face was measured under three between-subjects conditions: a baseline “preference” (i.e., without familiarization), after familiarization to Black faces, or after familiarization to White faces. Compared to infants’ a priori looking preferences as revealed in the baseline condition, only when familiarized to Black faces did infants look longer at the "not-familiarized-category" face at test. According to the standard categorization paradigm used, such longer looking time at the novel (i.e., "not-familiarized-category") exemplar at test, indicated that categorization of the familiarized faces had ensued. This is consistent with the idea that prior to their first birthday, infants already tend to represent own-race faces as individuals and other-race faces as a category. If this is the case, then infants might also be less likely to form subordinate categories within other-race than own-race categories. In Experiment 2, infants (N = 34) distinguished between an arbitrary (shirt-color) based sub-categories only when shirt-wearers were White, but not when they were Black. These findings confirm that perceptual narrowing of other-race faces blurs distinctions among members of unfamiliar categories. Consequently, infants: a) readily categorize other-race faces as being of the same kind, and b) find it hard to distinguish between their sub-categories.
Highlights
In the present two studies we addressed this stipulation about unfamiliar-race faces directly
Given our goal to assess the effect of familiarization beyond infants’ potential a priori preference for familiar vs. unfamiliar-race faces, we used as our dependent measure the percentage of looking time at the Black test exemplar, out of the total looking time at both test exemplars
Whereas the proportion of infants who looked longer at the Black exemplar in the Baseline (77%) and White familiarization (79%) conditions were significantly different from chance distribution (χ2(1, n = 26) = 7.538, p = 0.006, and χ2(1, n = 29) = 9.966, p = 0.002, respectively), this was not the case in the Black familiarization condition (50%; χ2(1, n = 26) = 0.0, p = 1.0)
Summary
In order to uncover conclusively whether this asymmetry derives from differential categorization capacities of familiar vs unfamiliar races, it is imperative to first determine infants’ baseline looking preferences towards faces from the different races [34]. Upon seeing a series of faces from an unfamiliar race (Black adults), infants would be less capable of perceiving them as distinct individuals They would be more likely to perceive the similarities among them, and construe them as a category. The hypothesis was that if infants more readily construe faces from an unfamiliar race as a category, infants’ looking time pattern at test should differ the most–compared to the baseline–after exposure to Black than to White familiarization exemplars. If targets’ gender contributes to racial categorization, we would expect infants to evince categorization of women more than of men (i.e., across all other factors)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
