Effects of Race on Infant Facial Recognition

From very early on in life, we learn to recognize faces, whether they be familiar or foreign. This does not take any extra effort on our part, as it is one of the natural processes of human development. This recognition continues to become more and more specific over time, allowing us to distinguish between family members, friends and strangers. In addition to these categorizations, there are many subconscious social components to this recognition that we may not take into consideration on a daily basis. However, many researchers make this their focus, especially when studying infant attention biases. One such researcher, Dr. Greg Reynolds, focuses on distinctions such as gender and attractiveness biases in infants, as well as race biases. In the article, "The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective", researchers determined using event related potentials that basic perceptual narrowing, a process in which infants learn to better process stimuli seen frequently in their native environment to the exclusion of foreign stimuli, occurs in infants as young as 6 months. In terms of race processing, the article mentions that the Other Race Effect (ORE), the lessened ability to process faces of races other than the infant's own, can be decreased or erased with exposure to other races and is not found for infants regularly exposed to multiracial environments. This article focuses on Caucasian babies and contributes the effects of the ORE to perceptual narrowing. This kind of differential processing based on race as early on as infancy is a worrying example of how quickly and easily damaging biases can be made later on in life.

In fact, in a study by Lee et al. entitled "Face race processing and racial bias in early development: A perceptual-social linkage" there were connections drawn between the perceptual narrowing of one’s own race in one category and other races in another and the early beginnings of racial biases we see pervasive in our society today. The idea behind this is that many of the experiences of the infant with members of their own race tend to be positive and life sustaining, so they associate the two, thus leading to a natural own-race bias. However, the researchers note that these findings only demonstrate initial formation of possible future biases, and the possibility of furthering of these biases into active discrimination is dependent on the environment in which the infant grows. Therefore, even though these processes are natural in infants and unavoidable to a certain degree, there are positive ways to balance out the effects of perceptual narrowing and avoid nurturing harmful biases now that we know they can begin in infancy.

Works Cited

Lee, Kang et al. “Face race processing and racial bias in early development: A perceptual-social linkage.” Current directions in psychological science vol. 26,3 (2017): 256-262. doi:10.1177/0963721417690276

Reynolds, G. D., & Roth, K. C. (2018). The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00222