Visual selective attention biases contribute to the other‐race effect among 9‐month‐old infants

During the first year of life, infants maintain their ability to discriminate faces from their own race but become less able to differentiate other‐race faces. Though this is likely due to daily experience with own‐race faces, the mechanisms linking repeated exposure to optimal face processing remain unclear. One possibility is that frequent experience with own‐race faces generates a selective attention bias to these faces. Selective attention elicits enhancement of attended information and suppression of distraction to improve visual processing of attended objects. Thus attention biases to own‐race faces may boost processing and discrimination of these faces relative to other‐race faces. We used a spatial cueing task to bias attention to own‐ or other‐race faces among Caucasian 9‐month‐old infants. Infants discriminated faces in the focus of the attention bias, regardless of race , indicating that infants remained sensitive to differences among other‐race faces. Instead, efficacy of face discrimination reflected the extent of attention engagement. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc . Dev Psychobiol 58: 355–365, 2016.