Culture Shapes Efficiency of Facial Age Judgments

Background

Cultural differences in socialization can lead to characteristic differences in how we perceive the world. Consistent with this influence of differential experience, our perception of faces (e.g., preference, recognition ability) is shaped by our previous experience with different groups of individuals.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here, we examined whether cultural differences in social practices influence our perception of faces. Japanese, Chinese, and Asian-Canadian young adults made relative age judgments (i.e., which of these two faces is older?) for East Asian faces. Cross-cultural differences in the emphasis on respect for older individuals was reflected in participants'' latency in facial age judgments for middle-age adult faces—with the Japanese young adults performing the fastest, followed by the Chinese, then the Asian-Canadians. In addition, consistent with the differential behavioural and linguistic markers used in the Japanese culture when interacting with individuals younger than oneself, only the Japanese young adults showed an advantage in judging the relative age of children''s faces.

Conclusions/Significance

Our results show that different sociocultural practices shape our efficiency in processing facial age information. The impact of culture may potentially calibrate other aspects of face processing.     

On the perception of religious group membership from faces

Background

The study of social categorization has largely been confined to examining groups distinguished by perceptually obvious cues. Yet many ecologically important group distinctions are less clear, permitting insights into the general processes involved in person perception. Although religious group membership is thought to be perceptually ambiguous, folk beliefs suggest that Mormons and non-Mormons can be categorized from their appearance. We tested whether Mormons could be distinguished from non-Mormons and investigated the basis for this effect to gain insight to how subtle perceptual cues can support complex social categorizations.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Participants categorized Mormons'' and non-Mormons'' faces or facial features according to their group membership. Individuals could distinguish between the two groups significantly better than chance guessing from their full faces and faces without hair, with eyes and mouth covered, without outer face shape, and inverted 180°; but not from isolated features (i.e., eyes, nose, or mouth). Perceivers'' estimations of their accuracy did not match their actual accuracy. Exploration of the remaining features showed that Mormons and non-Mormons significantly differed in perceived health and that these perceptions were related to perceptions of skin quality, as demonstrated in a structural equation model representing the contributions of skin color and skin texture. Other judgments related to health (facial attractiveness, facial symmetry, and structural aspects related to body weight) did not differ between the two groups. Perceptions of health were also responsible for differences in perceived spirituality, explaining folk hypotheses that Mormons are distinct because they appear more spiritual than non-Mormons.

Conclusions/Significance

Subtle markers of group membership can influence how others are perceived and categorized. Perceptions of health from non-obvious and minimal cues distinguished individuals according to their religious group membership. These data illustrate how the non-conscious detection of very subtle differences in others'' appearances supports cognitively complex judgments such as social categorization.     

Unfakeable facial configurations affect strategic choices in trust games with or without information about past behavior

Background

Many human interactions are built on trust, so widespread confidence in first impressions generally favors individuals with trustworthy-looking appearances. However, few studies have explicitly examined: 1) the contribution of unfakeable facial features to trust-based decisions, and 2) how these cues are integrated with information about past behavior.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using highly controlled stimuli and an improved experimental procedure, we show that unfakeable facial features associated with the appearance of trustworthiness attract higher investments in trust games. The facial trustworthiness premium is large for decisions based solely on faces, with trustworthy identities attracting 42% more money (Study 1), and remains significant though reduced to 6% when reputational information is also available (Study 2). The face trustworthiness premium persists with real (rather than virtual) currency and when higher payoffs are at stake (Study 3).

Conclusions/Significance

Our results demonstrate that cooperation may be affected not only by controllable appearance cues (e.g., clothing, facial expressions) as shown previously, but also by features that are impossible to mimic (e.g., individual facial structure). This unfakeable face trustworthiness effect is not limited to the rare situations where people lack any information about their partners, but survives in richer environments where relevant details about partner past behavior are available.     

Does Masculinity Matter? The Contribution of Masculine Face Shape to Male Attractiveness in Humans

Background

In many animals, exaggerated sex-typical male traits are preferred by females, and may be a signal of both past and current disease resistance. The proposal that the same is true in humans – i.e., that masculine men are immunocompetent and attractive – underpins a large literature on facial masculinity preferences. Recently, theoretical models have suggested that current condition may be a better index of mate value than past immunocompetence. This is particularly likely in populations where pathogenic fluctuation is fast relative to host life history. As life history is slow in humans, there is reason to expect that, among humans, condition-dependent traits might contribute more to attractiveness than relatively stable traits such as masculinity. To date, however, there has been little rigorous assessment of whether, in the presence of variation in other cues, masculinity predicts attractiveness or not.

Methodology/Principal Findings

The relationship between masculinity and attractiveness was assessed in two samples of male faces. Most previous research has assessed masculinity either with subjective ratings or with simple anatomical measures. Here, we used geometric morphometric techniques to assess facial masculinity, generating a morphological masculinity measure based on a discriminant function that correctly classified >96% faces as male or female. When assessed using this measure, there was no relationship between morphological masculinity and rated attractiveness. In contrast, skin colour – a fluctuating, condition-dependent cue – was a significant predictor of attractiveness.

Conclusions/Significance

These findings suggest that facial morphological masculinity may contribute less to men''s attractiveness than previously assumed. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that current condition is more relevant to male mate value than past disease resistance, and hence that temporally fluctuating traits (such as colour) contribute more to male attractiveness than stable cues of sexual dimorphism.     

Social Judgement in Borderline Personality Disorder

Background

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a common and serious mental illness, associated with a high risk of suicide and self harm. Those with a diagnosis of BPD often display difficulties with social interaction and struggle to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. Here we investigated the ability of participants with BPD to make social inferences from faces.

Method

20 participants with BPD and 21 healthy controls were shown a series of faces and asked to judge these according to one of six characteristics (age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, intelligence, approachability, trustworthiness). The number and direction of errors made (compared to population norms) were recorded for analysis.

Results

Participants with a diagnosis of BPD displayed significant impairments in making judgements from faces. In particular, the BPD Group judged faces as less approachable and less trustworthy than controls. Furthermore, within the BPD Group there was a correlation between scores on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and bias towards judging faces as unapproachable.

Conclusion

Individuals with a diagnosis of BPD have difficulty making appropriate social judgements about others from their faces. Judging more faces as unapproachable and untrustworthy indicates that this group may have a heightened sensitivity to perceiving potential threat, and this should be considered in clinical management and treatment.     

Effect of empathy trait on attention to various facial expressions: evidence from N170 and late positive potential (LPP)

Background

The present study sought to clarify the relationship between empathy trait and attention responses to happy, angry, surprised, afraid, and sad facial expressions. As indices of attention, we recorded event-related potentials (ERP) and focused on N170 and late positive potential (LPP) components.

Methods

Twenty-two participants (12 males, 10 females) discriminated facial expressions (happy, angry, surprised, afraid, and sad) from emotionally neutral faces under an oddball paradigm. The empathy trait of participants was measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI, J Pers Soc Psychol 44:113–126, 1983).

Results

Participants with higher IRI scores showed: 1) more negative amplitude of N170 (140 to 200 ms) in the right posterior temporal area elicited by happy, angry, surprised, and afraid faces; 2) more positive amplitude of early LPP (300 to 600 ms) in the parietal area elicited in response to angry and afraid faces; and 3) more positive amplitude of late LPP (600 to 800 ms) in the frontal area elicited in response to happy, angry, surprised, afraid, and sad faces, compared to participants with lower IRI scores.

Conclusions

These results suggest that individuals with high empathy pay attention to various facial expressions more than those with low empathy, from very-early stage (reflected in N170) to late-stage (reflected in LPP) processing of faces.     

Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias

Background

Implicit racial bias denotes socio-cognitive attitudes towards other-race groups that are exempt from conscious awareness. In parallel, other-race faces are more difficult to differentiate relative to own-race faces – the “Other-Race Effect.” To examine the relationship between these two biases, we trained Caucasian subjects to better individuate other-race faces and measured implicit racial bias for those faces both before and after training.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Two groups of Caucasian subjects were exposed equally to the same African American faces in a training protocol run over 5 sessions. In the individuation condition, subjects learned to discriminate between African American faces. In the categorization condition, subjects learned to categorize faces as African American or not. For both conditions, both pre- and post-training we measured the Other-Race Effect using old-new recognition and implicit racial biases using a novel implicit social measure – the “Affective Lexical Priming Score” (ALPS). Subjects in the individuation condition, but not in the categorization condition, showed improved discrimination of African American faces with training. Concomitantly, subjects in the individuation condition, but not the categorization condition, showed a reduction in their ALPS. Critically, for the individuation condition only, the degree to which an individual subject''s ALPS decreased was significantly correlated with the degree of improvement that subject showed in their ability to differentiate African American faces.

Conclusions/Significance

Our results establish a causal link between the Other-Race Effect and implicit racial bias. We demonstrate that training that ameliorates the perceptual Other-Race Effect also reduces socio-cognitive implicit racial bias. These findings suggest that implicit racial biases are multifaceted, and include malleable perceptual skills that can be modified with relatively little training.     

Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated from Their Faces

Background

Individuals'' faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here we found that individuals'' political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats.

Conclusions/Significance

These data suggest that perceivers'' beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others'' political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing.     

The effect of real-world personal familiarity on the speed of face information processing

Background

Previous studies have explored the effects of familiarity on various kinds of visual face judgments, yet the role of familiarity in face processing is not fully understood. Across different face judgments and stimulus sets, the data is equivocal as to whether or not familiarity impacts recognition processes.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here, we examine the effect of real-world personal familiarity in three simple delayed-match-to-sample tasks in which subjects were required to match faces on the basis of orientation (upright v. inverted), gender and identity. We find that subjects had a significant speed advantage with familiar faces in all three tasks, with large effects for the gender and identity matching tasks.

Conclusion/Significance

Our data indicates that real-world experience with a face exerts a powerful influence on face processing in tasks where identity information is irrelevant, even in tasks that could in principle be solved via low-level cues. These results underscore the importance of experience in shaping visual recognition processes.     

Embodied Emotion Modulates Neural Signature of Performance Monitoring

Background

Recent research on the “embodiment of emotion” implies that experiencing an emotion may involve perceptual, somatovisceral, and motor feedback aspects. For example, manipulations of facial expression and posture appear to induce emotional states and influence how affective information is processed. The present study investigates whether performance monitoring, a cognitive process known to be under heavy control of the dopaminergic system, is modulated by induced facial expressions. In particular, we focused on the error-related negativity, an electrophysiological correlate of performance monitoring.

Methods/Principal Findings

During a choice reaction task, participants held a Chinese chop stick either horizontally between the teeth (“smile” condition) or, in different runs, vertically (“no smile”) with the upper lip. In a third control condition, no chop stick was used (“no stick”). It could be shown on a separate sample that the facial feedback procedure is feasible to induce mild changes in positive affect. In the ERP sample, the smile condition, hypothesized to lead to an increase in dopaminergic activity, was associated with a decrease of ERN amplitude relative to “no smile” and “no stick” conditions.

Conclusion

Embodying emotions by induced facial expressions leads to a changes in the neural correlates of error detection. We suggest that this is due to the joint influence of the dopaminergic system on positive affect and performance monitoring.     

Larger than Life: Humans' Nonverbal Status Cues Alter Perceived Size

Background

Social dominance and physical size are closely linked. Nonverbal dominance displays in many non-human species are known to increase the displayer''s apparent size. Humans also employ a variety of nonverbal cues that increase apparent status, but it is not yet known whether these cues function via a similar mechanism: by increasing the displayer''s apparent size.

Methodology/Principal Finding

We generated stimuli in which actors displayed high status, neutral, or low status cues that were drawn from the findings of a recent meta-analysis. We then conducted four studies that indicated that nonverbal cues that increase apparent status do so by increasing the perceived size of the displayer. Experiment 1 demonstrated that nonverbal status cues affect perceivers'' judgments of physical size. The results of Experiment 2 showed that altering simple perceptual cues can affect judgments of both size and perceived status. Experiment 3 used objective measurements to demonstrate that status cues change targets'' apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver, and Experiment 4 showed that changes in perceived size mediate changes in perceived status, and that the cue most associated with this phenomenon is postural openness.

Conclusions/Significance

We conclude that nonverbal cues associated with social dominance also affect the perceived size of the displayer. This suggests that certain nonverbal dominance cues in humans may function as they do in other species: by creating the appearance of changes in physical size.     

Brain Response to a Humanoid Robot in Areas Implicated in the Perception of Human Emotional Gestures

Background

The humanoid robot WE4-RII was designed to express human emotions in order to improve human-robot interaction. We can read the emotions depicted in its gestures, yet might utilize different neural processes than those used for reading the emotions in human agents.

Methodology

Here, fMRI was used to assess how brain areas activated by the perception of human basic emotions (facial expression of Anger, Joy, Disgust) and silent speech respond to a humanoid robot impersonating the same emotions, while participants were instructed to attend either to the emotion or to the motion depicted.

Principal Findings

Increased responses to robot compared to human stimuli in the occipital and posterior temporal cortices suggest additional visual processing when perceiving a mechanical anthropomorphic agent. In contrast, activity in cortical areas endowed with mirror properties, like left Broca''s area for the perception of speech, and in the processing of emotions like the left anterior insula for the perception of disgust and the orbitofrontal cortex for the perception of anger, is reduced for robot stimuli, suggesting lesser resonance with the mechanical agent. Finally, instructions to explicitly attend to the emotion significantly increased response to robot, but not human facial expressions in the anterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus, a neural marker of motor resonance.

Conclusions

Motor resonance towards a humanoid robot, but not a human, display of facial emotion is increased when attention is directed towards judging emotions.

Significance

Artificial agents can be used to assess how factors like anthropomorphism affect neural response to the perception of human actions.     

Human's Cognitive Ability to Assess Facial Cues from Photographs: A Study of Sexual Selection in the Bolivian Amazon

Background

Evolutionary theory suggests that natural selection favors the evolution of cognitive abilities which allow humans to use facial cues to assess traits of others. The use of facial and somatic cues by humans has been studied mainly in western industrialized countries, leaving unanswered whether results are valid across cultures.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Our objectives were to test (i) if previous finding about raters'' ability to get accurate information about an individual by looking at his facial photograph held in low-income non western rural societies and (ii) whether women and men differ in this ability. To answer the questions we did a study during July-August 2007 among the Tsimane'', a native Amazonian society of foragers-farmers in Bolivia. We asked 40 females and 40 males 16–25 years of age to rate four traits in 93 facial photographs of other Tsimane'' males. The four traits were based on sexual selection theory, and included health, dominance, knowledge, and sociability. The rating scale for each trait ranged from one (least) to four (most). The average rating for each trait was calculated for each individual in the photograph and regressed against objective measures of the trait from the person in the photograph. We found that (i) female Tsimane'' raters were able to assess facial cues related to health, dominance, and knowledge and (ii) male Tsimane'' raters were able to assess facial cues related to dominance, knowledge, and sociability.

Conclusions/Significance

Our results support the existence of a human ability to identify objective traits from facial cues, as suggested by evolutionary theory.     

Are Neoclassical Canons Valid for Southern Chinese Faces?

Background

Proportions derived from neoclassical canons, initially described by Renaissance sculptors and painters, are still being employed as aesthetic guidelines during the clinical assessment of the facial morphology.

Objective

1. to determine the applicability of neoclassical canons for Southern Chinese faces and 2. to explore gender differences in relation to the applicability of the neoclassical canons and their variants.

Methodology

3-D photographs acquired from 103 young adults (51 males and 52 females) without facial dysmorphology were used to test applicability of four neoclassical canons. Standard anthropometric measurements that determine the facial canons were made on these 3-D images. The validity of the canons as well as their different variants were quantified.

Principal Findings

The neoclassical cannons seldom applied to these individuals, and facial three-section and orbital canons did not apply at all. The orbitonasal canon was most frequently applicable, with a frequency of 19%. Significant sexual dimorphism was found relative to the prevalence of the variants of facial three-section and orbitonasal canons.

Conclusion

The neoclassical canons did not appear to apply to our sample when rigorous quantitative measurements were employed. Thus, they should not be used as esthetic goals for craniofacial surgical interventions.     

Emotional Modulation of Attention: Fear Increases but Disgust Reduces the Attentional Blink

Background

It is well known that facial expressions represent important social cues. In humans expressing facial emotion, fear may be configured to maximize sensory exposure (e.g., increases visual input) whereas disgust can reduce sensory exposure (e.g., decreases visual input). To investigate whether such effects also extend to the attentional system, we used the “attentional blink” (AB) paradigm. Many studies have documented that the second target (T2) of a pair is typically missed when presented within a time window of about 200–500 ms from the first to-be-detected target (T1; i.e., the AB effect). It has recently been proposed that the AB effect depends on the efficiency of a gating system which facilitates the entrance of relevant input into working memory, while inhibiting irrelevant input. Following the inhibitory response on post T1 distractors, prolonged inhibition of the subsequent T2 is observed. In the present study, we hypothesized that processing facial expressions of emotion would influence this attentional gating. Fearful faces would increase but disgust faces would decrease inhibition of the second target.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We showed that processing fearful versus disgust faces has different effects on these attentional processes. We found that processing fear faces impaired the detection of T2 to a greater extent than did the processing disgust faces. This finding implies emotion-specific modulation of attention.

Conclusions/Significance

Based on the recent literature on attention, our finding suggests that processing fear-related stimuli exerts greater inhibitory responses on distractors relative to processing disgust-related stimuli. This finding is of particular interest for researchers examining the influence of emotional processing on attention and memory in both clinical and normal populations. For example, future research could extend upon the current study to examine whether inhibitory processes invoked by fear-related stimuli may be the mechanism underlying the enhanced learning of fear-related stimuli.     

Prolonged visual experience in adulthood modulates holistic face perception

Background

Using the well-known composite illusion as a marker of the holistic perception of faces, we tested how prolonged visual experience with a specific population of faces (4- to 6-year-old children) modulates the face perception system in adulthood.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We report a face composite effect that is larger for adult than children faces in a group of adults without experience with children faces (“children-face novices”), while it is of equal magnitude for adults and children faces in a population of preschool teachers (“children-face experts”). When considering preschool teachers only, we observed a significant correlation between the number of years of experience with children faces and the differential face composite effect between children and adults faces. Participants with at least 10 years of qualitative experience with children faces had a larger composite face effect for children than adult faces.

Conclusions/Significance

Overall, these observations indicate that even in adulthood face processes can be reshaped qualitatively, presumably to facilitate efficient processing of the differential morphological features of the frequently encountered population of faces.     

Putting Culture Under the ‘Spotlight’ Reveals Universal Information Use for Face Recognition

Background

Eye movement strategies employed by humans to identify conspecifics are not universal. Westerners predominantly fixate the eyes during face recognition, whereas Easterners more the nose region, yet recognition accuracy is comparable. However, natural fixations do not unequivocally represent information extraction. So the question of whether humans universally use identical facial information to recognize faces remains unresolved.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We monitored eye movements during face recognition of Western Caucasian (WC) and East Asian (EA) observers with a novel technique in face recognition that parametrically restricts information outside central vision. We used ‘Spotlights’ with Gaussian apertures of 2°, 5° or 8° dynamically centered on observers'' fixations. Strikingly, in constrained Spotlight conditions (2° and 5°) observers of both cultures actively fixated the same facial information: the eyes and mouth. When information from both eyes and mouth was simultaneously available when fixating the nose (8°), as expected EA observers shifted their fixations towards this region.

Conclusions/Significance

Social experience and cultural factors shape the strategies used to extract information from faces, but these results suggest that external forces do not modulate information use. Human beings rely on identical facial information to recognize conspecifics, a universal law that might be dictated by the evolutionary constraints of nature and not nurture.     

Tracking subtle stereotypes of children with trisomy 21: from facial-feature-based to implicit stereotyping

Background

Stigmatization is one of the greatest obstacles to the successful integration of people with Trisomy 21 (T21 or Down syndrome), the most frequent genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability. Research on attitudes and stereotypes toward these people still focuses on explicit measures subjected to social-desirability biases, and neglects how variability in facial stigmata influences attitudes and stereotyping.

Methodology/Principal Findings

The participants were 165 adults including 55 young adult students, 55 non-student adults, and 55 professional caregivers working with intellectually disabled persons. They were faced with implicit association tests (IAT), a well-known technique whereby response latency is used to capture the relative strength with which some groups of people—here photographed faces of typically developing children and children with T21—are automatically (without conscious awareness) associated with positive versus negative attributes in memory. Each participant also rated the same photographed faces (consciously accessible evaluations). We provide the first evidence that the positive bias typically found in explicit judgments of children with T21 is smaller for those whose facial features are highly characteristic of this disorder, compared to their counterparts with less distinctive features and to typically developing children. We also show that this bias can coexist with negative evaluations at the implicit level (with large effect sizes), even among professional caregivers.

Conclusion

These findings support recent models of feature-based stereotyping, and more importantly show how crucial it is to go beyond explicit evaluations to estimate the true extent of stigmatization of intellectually disabled people.     

The role of gamma-band activity in the representation of faces: reduced activity in the fusiform face area in congenital prosopagnosia

Background

Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) describes an impairment in face processing that is presumably present from birth. The neuronal correlates of this dysfunction are still under debate. In the current paper, we investigate high-frequent oscillatory activity in response to faces in persons with CP. Such neuronal activity is thought to reflect higher-level representations for faces.

Methodology

Source localization of induced Gamma-Band Responses (iGBR) measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used to establish the origin of oscillatory activity in response to famous and unknown faces which were presented in upright and inverted orientation. Persons suffering from congenital prosopagnosia (CP) were compared to matched controls.

Principal Findings

Corroborating earlier research, both groups revealed amplified iGBR in response to upright compared to inverted faces predominately in a time interval between 170 and 330 ms and in a frequency range from 50–100 Hz. Oscillatory activity upon known faces was smaller in comparison to unknown faces, suggesting a “sharpening” effect reflecting more efficient processing for familiar stimuli. These effects were seen in a wide cortical network encompassing temporal and parietal areas involved in the disambiguation of homogenous stimuli such as faces, and in the retrieval of semantic information. Importantly, participants suffering from CP displayed a strongly reduced iGBR in the left fusiform area compared to control participants.

Conclusions

In sum, these data stress the crucial role of oscillatory activity for face representation and demonstrate the involvement of a distributed occipito-temporo-parietal network in generating iGBR. This study also provides the first evidence that persons suffering from an agnosia actually display reduced gamma band activity. Finally, the results argue strongly against the view that oscillatory activity is a mere epiphenomenon brought fourth by rapid eye-movements (micro saccades).     

Attentional Prioritization of Infant Faces Is Limited to Own-Race Infants

Background

Recent evidence indicates that infant faces capture attention automatically, presumably to elicit caregiving behavior from adults and leading to greater probability of progeny survival. Elsewhere, evidence demonstrates that people show deficiencies in the processing of other-race relative to own-race faces. We ask whether this other-race effect impacts on attentional attraction to infant faces. Using a dot-probe task to reveal the spatial allocation of attention, we investigate whether other-race infants capture attention.

Principal Findings

South Asian and White participants (young adults aged 18–23 years) responded to a probe shape appearing in a location previously occupied by either an infant face or an adult face; across trials, the race (South Asian/White) of the faces was manipulated. Results indicated that participants were faster to respond to probes that appeared in the same location as infant faces than adult faces, but only on own-race trials.

Conclusions/Significance

Own-race infant faces attract attention, but other-race infant faces do not. Sensitivity to face-specific care-seeking cues in other-race kindenschema may be constrained by interracial contact and experience.