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Shape, color and the other‐race effect in the infant brain
Author(s) -
Balas Benjamin,
Westerlund Alissa,
Hung Katherine,
Nelson III Charles A.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01039.x
Subject(s) - psychology , race (biology) , developmental psychology , face perception , differential effects , ethnic group , cognitive psychology , audiology , perception , neuroscience , botany , biology , medicine , sociology , anthropology
The ‘other‐race’ effect describes the phenomenon in which faces are difficult to distinguish from one another if they belong to an ethnic or racial group to which the observer has had little exposure. Adult observers typically display multiple forms of recognition error for other‐race faces, and infants exhibit behavioral evidence of a developing other‐race effect at about 9 months of age. The neural correlates of the adult other‐race effect have been identified using ERPs and fMRI, but the effects of racial category on infants’ neural response to face stimuli have to date not been described. We examine two distinct components of the infant ERP response to human faces and demonstrate through the use of computer‐generated ‘hybrid’ faces that the observed other‐race effect is not the result of low‐level sensitivity to 3D shape and color differences between the stimuli. Rather, differential processing depends critically on the joint encoding of race‐specific features.