Simple training helps infants maintain ability to distinguish other-race faces

July, 2011

New research confirms the role of experience in the other race effect, and shows how easily the problem in discriminating faces belonging to other races might be prevented.

Our common difficulty in recognizing faces that belong to races other than our own (or more specifically, those we have less experience of) is known as the Other Race Effect. Previous research has revealed that six-month-old babies show no signs of this bias, but by nine months, their ability to recognize faces is reduced to those races they see around them.

Now, an intriguing study has looked into whether infants can be trained in such a way that they can maintain the ability to process other-race faces. The study involved 32 six-month-old Caucasian infants, who were shown picture books that contained either Chinese (training group) or Caucasian (control group) faces. There were eight different books, each containing either six female faces or six male faces (with names). Parents were asked to present the pictures in the book to their child for 2–3 minutes every day for 1 week, then every other day for the next week, and then less frequently (approximately once every 6 days) following a fixed schedule of exposures during the 3-month period (equating to approximately 70 minutes of exposure overall).

When tested at nine months, there were significant differences between the two groups that indicated that the group who trained on the Chinese faces had maintained their ability to discriminate Chinese faces, while those who had trained on the Caucasian faces had lost it (specifically, they showed no preference for novel or familiar faces, treating them both the same).

It’s worth noting that the babies generalized from the training pictures, all of which showed the faces in the same “passport photo” type pose, to a different orientation (three-quarter pose) during test trials. This finding indicates that infants were actually learning the face, not simply an image.

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