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. 2012 Aug;112(4):484-95.
doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.04.005. Epub 2012 May 22.

Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants

Gizelle Anzures  1 , Andrea Wheeler, Paul C Quinn, Olivier Pascalis, Alan M Slater, Michelle Heron-Delaney, James W Tanaka, Kang Lee
Affiliations

Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants

Gizelle Anzures et al. J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Aug.

Abstract

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants' visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate between novel and familiarized Asian faces at the beginning of testing were given brief daily experience with Asian female faces in the experimental condition and Caucasian female faces in the control condition. At the end of 3 weeks, only infants who received daily experience with Asian females showed above-chance recognition of novel Asian female and male faces. Furthermore, infants in the experimental condition showed greater efficiency in learning novel Asian females compared with infants in the control condition. Thus, visual experience with a novel stimulus category can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing during infancy via improved stimulus recognition and encoding.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example of images from videos of Asian female adults shown to the experimental group (top) and Caucasian female adults shown to the control group (bottom).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Examples of stimuli in the recognition memory task with Asian female adult faces (left) and Asian male adult faces (right).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Infants’ Mean Novelty Preference Scores for Asian female faces (A) and Asian male faces (B) prior to video exposure (Baseline), after a brief video exposure (Day 1), after 7 to 14 days of video exposure, and after 21 days of video exposure (* indicates a significant novelty preference at p < .05)*
Figure 3
Figure 3
Infants’ Mean Novelty Preference Scores for Asian female faces (A) and Asian male faces (B) prior to video exposure (Baseline), after a brief video exposure (Day 1), after 7 to 14 days of video exposure, and after 21 days of video exposure (* indicates a significant novelty preference at p < .05)*
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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