The effect of heterogeneous race exposure during infancy

Abstract

Over the first year of life face processing passes through a period of perceptual narrowing. Such narrowing reflects the closure of a sensitive period associated with a loss of perceptual and neural plasticity. One example of perceptual narrowing is the “other-race” effect (ORE), in which humans more easily recognize and discriminate faces of one’s own race than faces different from their own. In the present study, we sought to understand the consequences of having limited racial experience versus exposure to a diverse racial environment with regard to infants’ looking preferences to different race faces. We employed a looking time paradigm with 47 infants to examine race preferences as a function of differential exposure to multiple races in the caregiving environment at 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months of age. The results revealed: 1) Caucasian and African-American infants were more likely to have homogenous race exposure to caregivers of their own race; 2) there was no difference in preferential looking behavior between infants exposed to a single race versus multiple races at all ages except 10-months (infants exposed to multiple races fixated longer to a race than infants exposed to only one race); 3) infants allocate their gaze more uniformly across the face pairs over time, and 4) infants in this sample did not exhibit own-race preferences. The results suggest that racial exposure to caregivers has little influence on face preference among infants and that face preferences tend to disappear with age. Further studies are needed to evaluate the role of race preference on the child’s neurobehavioral and social development.