Cross-Race Preferences for Same-Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3-Month-Old Infants

A visual preference procedure was used to examine preferences among faces of different races and ethnicities (African, Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern) in Chinese 3-month-old infants exposed only to Chinese faces. The infants demonstrated a preference for faces from their own ethnic group. Alongside previous results showing that Caucasian infants exposed only to Caucasian faces prefer same-race faces (Kelly et al., 2005) and that Caucasian and African infants exposed only to native faces prefer the same over the other-race faces (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006), the findings reported here (a) extend the same-race preference observed in young infants to a new race of infants (Chinese), and (b) show that cross-race preferences for same-race faces extend beyond the perceptually robust contrast between African and Caucasian faces

The Other-Race Effect in a Longitudinal Sample of 3-, 6-and 9-Month-Old Infants: Evidence of a Training Effect

Spangler SM, Schwarzer G, Freitag C, et al. The Other-Race Effect in a Longitudinal Sample of 3-, 6-and 9-Month-Old Infants: Evidence of a Training Effect. Infancy. 2013;18(4):516-533.We investigated the development of the other-race effect ORE in a longitudinal sample of 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants. Previous research using cross-sectional samples has shown an unstable ORE at 3months, an increase at 6months and full development at 9months. In Experiment 1, we tested whether 9-month-olds showed the ORE with Caucasian and African faces. As expected, the 9-month-olds discriminated faces within their own ethnicity (Caucasian) but not within the unfamiliar ethnicity (African). In months. In Experiment 2, we longitudinally tested infants at 3, 6, and 9months by presenting either the Caucasian or the African faces used in Experiment 1. In contrast to previous cross-sectional studies and Experiment 1, we found that infants discriminated between all stimuli. Hence, we did not find the ORE in this longitudinal study even at 9months. We assume that the infants in our longitudinal study showed no ORE because of previous repetitive exposure to African faces at 3 and 6months. We argue that only a few presentations of faces from other ethnic categories sufficiently slow the development of the ORE