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Visual selective attention biases contribute to the other‐race effect among 9‐month‐old infants
Author(s) -
Markant Julie,
Oakes Lisa M.,
Amso Dima
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
developmental psychobiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.055
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1098-2302
pISSN - 0012-1630
DOI - 10.1002/dev.21375
Subject(s) - race (biology) , distraction , psychology , visual attention , developmental psychology , selective attention , face (sociological concept) , attentional bias , task (project management) , visual processing , cognitive psychology , audiology , cognition , perception , medicine , neuroscience , botany , biology , social science , management , sociology , economics
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.