Children (but not adults) judge similarity in own- and other-race faces by the color of their skin

Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children's and adults' racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces

Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization-the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces categorized as Black) and the ingroup overexclusion effect, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a salient outgroup, regardless of the group's status. Without developmental research with racially diverse samples, it is unclear when these categorization patterns emerge. Study 1 included White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children (aged 3- to 7-years) and their parents to test how racial group membership and social context influence face categorization biases. To provide the clearest test of hypodescent and ingroup overexclusion, White participants came from majority White neighborhoods and Black participants from majority Black neighborhoods (with Biracial participants from more racially diverse neighborhoods)-two samples with prominent racial ingroups. Study 2 aimed to replicate the parent findings with a separate sample of White, Black, Black/White Biracial, and Asian adults. Results suggest the ingroup overexclusion effect is present across populations early in development and persists into adulthood. Additionally, categorization was meaningfully related to parental context, pinpointing a pathway that potentially contributes to ingroup overexclusion. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children and adults tended to categorize racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial faces as racial outgroup members, even if the outgroup was White. This contradicts most work arguing Black/White Biracial racially ambiguous people are more often seen as Black. Children and parents' categorizations were related, though children's categorizations were not related to socialization above and beyond parents' categorizations. Children showed similar categorization patterns across dichotomous and continuous measures.

Sensitivity to face animacy and inversion in childhood: Evidence from EEG data

Adults exhibit relative behavioral difficulties in processing inanimate, artificial faces compared to real human faces, with implications for using artificial faces in research and designing artificial social agents. However, the developmental trajectory of inanimate face perception is unknown. To address this gap, we used electroencephalography to investigate inanimate faces processing in cross-sectional groups of 5-10-year-old children and adults. A face inversion manipulation was used to test whether face animacy processing relies on expert face processing strategies. Groups of 5-7-year-olds (N = 18), 8-10-year-olds (N = 18), and adults (N = 16) watched pictures of real or doll faces presented in an upright or inverted orientation. Analyses of event-related potentials revealed larger N170 amplitudes in response to doll faces, irrespective of age group or face orientation. Thus, the N170 is sensitive to face animacy by 5-7 years of age, but such sensitivity may not reflect high-level, expert face processing. Multivariate pattern analyses of the EEG signal additionally assessed whether animacy information could be reliably extracted during face processing. Face orientation, but not face animacy, could be reliably decoded from occipitotemporal channels in children and adults. Face animacy could be decoded from whole scalp channels in adults, but not children. Together, these results suggest that 5-10-year-old children exhibit some sensitivity to face animacy over occipitotemporal regions that is comparable to adults.

Shining a Light on Race: Contrast and Assimilation Effects in the Perception of Skin Tone and Racial Typicality

Researchers have long debated the extent to which an individual’s skin tone influences their perceived race. Brooks and Gwinn (2010) demonstrated that the race of surrounding faces can affect the perceived skin tone of a central target face without changing perceived racial typicality, suggesting that skin lightness makes a small contribution to judgments of race compared to morphological cues (the configuration and shape of the facial features). However, the lack of a consistent light source may have undermined the reliability of skin tone cues, encouraging observers to rely disproportionately on morphological cues instead. The current study addresses this concern by using 3D models of male faces with typically Black African or White European appearances that are illuminated by the same light source. Observers perceived target faces surrounded by White faces to have darker skin than those surrounded by Black faces, particularly for faces of intermediate lightness. However, when asked to judge racial typicality, a small assimilation effect was evident, with target faces perceived as more stereotypically White when surrounded by White than when surrounded by Black faces at intermediate levels of typicality. This evidence of assimilation effects for perceived racial typicality despite concurrent contrast effects on perceived skin lightness supports the previous conclusion that perceived skin lightness has little influence on judgments of racial typicality for racially ambiguous faces, even when lighting is consistent.

The neural correlates of Chinese children's spontaneous trait inferences: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

The results of multiple behavioral investigations indicate that children can develop spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) starting from when they are 8-9 years of age. However, little is known about the neural correlates of STIs when they first develop. In the present study, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) using an N400 paradigm. Seventeen 9-year-old Chinese children were first instructed to remember facial photos and paired trait-implying behaviors. Subsequently, they performed a lexical decision task in which faces were used to prime the inferred traits or their antonyms. Compared to the inferred traits, the antonyms exhibited a stronger amplitude on both N400 (370-500 ms) and negative slow wave (NSW; 550-800 ms). However, only N400 showed a right hemispheric dominance of STIs. In addition, ERSP results revealed stronger lower alpha band (7-10 Hz) activity for antonyms than inferred traits over the right parieto-occipital area from 420 ms to 800 ms. These findings, coupled with the electroencephalography (EEG) source localization (standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography [sLORETA]), provide evidence for a "monitoring-control" two-stage neural network.

The Development of White-Asian Categorization: Contributions from Skin Color and Other Physiognomic Cues

We examined the development of racial categorizations of faces spanning the European-East Asian ("White-Asian") categorical continuum in children between the ages of four and nine as well as adults. We employed a stimulus set that independently varied skin color and other aspects of facial physiognomy, allowing the contribution of each to be assessed independently and in interaction with each other. Results demonstrated substantial development across this age range in children's ability to draw on both sorts of cue, with over twice as much variance explained by stimulus variation in adults than children. Nonetheless, children were clearly sensitive to both skin color and other aspects of facial physiognomy, suggesting that understanding of the White-Asian category boundary develops in a somewhat different way than understanding of the White-Black category boundary, in which attention to features other than skin color appear only somewhat later. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for theories of social categorization.

Children's Racial Categorization in Context

The ability to discriminate visually based on race emerges early in infancy: 3-month-olds can perceptually differentiate faces by race and 6-month-olds can perceptually categorize faces by race. Between ages 6 and 8 years, children can sort others into racial groups. But to what extent are these abilities influenced by context? In this article, we review studies on children's racial categorization and discuss how our conclusions are affected by how we ask the questions (i.e., our methods and stimuli), where we ask them (i.e., the diversity of the child's surrounding environment), and whom we ask (i.e., the diversity of the children we study). Taken together, we suggest that despite a developmental readiness to categorize others by race, the use of race as a psychologically salient basis for categorization is far from inevitable and is shaped largely by the experimental setting and the greater cultural context.

Artificial faces are harder to remember

Observers interact with artificial faces in a range of different settings and in many cases must remember and identify computer-generated faces. In general, however, most adults have heavily biased experience favoring real faces over synthetic faces. It is well known that face recognition abilities are affected by experience such that faces belonging to "out-groups" defined by race or age are more poorly remembered and harder to discriminate from one another than faces belonging to the "in-group." Here, we examine the extent to which artificial faces form an "out-group" in this sense when other perceptual categories are matched. We rendered synthetic faces using photographs of real human faces and compared performance in a memory task and a discrimination task across real and artificial versions of the same faces. We found that real faces were easier to remember, but only slightly more discriminable than artificial faces. Artificial faces were also equally susceptible to the well-known face inversion effect, suggesting that while these patterns are still processed by the human visual system in a face-like manner, artificial appearance does compromise the efficiency of face processing.

A face detection bias for horizontal orientations develops in middle childhood

Faces are complex stimuli that can be described via intuitive facial features like the eyes, nose, and mouth, "configural" features like the distances between facial landmarks, and features that correspond to computations performed in the early visual system (e.g., oriented edges). With regard to this latter category of descriptors, adult face recognition relies disproportionately on information in specific spatial frequency and orientation bands: many recognition tasks are performed more accurately when adults have access to mid-range spatial frequencies (8-16 cycles/face) and horizontal orientations (Dakin and Watt, 2009). In the current study, we examined how this information bias develops in middle childhood. We recruited children between the ages of 5-10 years-old to participate in a simple categorization task that required them to label images according to whether they depicted a face or a house. Critically, children were presented with face and house images comprised either of primarily horizontal orientation energy, primarily vertical orientation energy, or both horizontal and vertical orientation energy. We predicted that any bias favoring horizontal information over vertical should be more evident in faces than in houses, and also that older children would be more likely to show such a bias than younger children. We designed our categorization task to be sufficiently easy that children would perform at near-ceiling accuracy levels, but with variation in response times that would reflect how they rely on different orientations as a function of age and object category. We found that horizontal bias for face detection (but not house detection) correlated significantly with age, suggesting an emergent category-specific bias for horizontal orientation energy that develops during middle childhood. These results thus suggest that the tuning of high-level recognition to specific low-level visual features takes place over several years of visual development.

N170 face specificity and face memory depend on hometown size

Face recognition depends on visual experience in a number of different ways. Infrequent exposure to faces belonging to categories defined by species, age, or race can lead to diminished memory for and discrimination between members of those categories relative to faces belonging to categories that dominate an observer's environment. Early visual impairment can also have long-lasting and broad effects on face discrimination - just a few months of visual impairment due to congenital cataracts can lead to diminished discrimination between faces that differ in their configuration, for example (Le Grand et al., 2001). Presently, we consider a novel aspect of visual experience that may impact face recognition: The approximate amount of different faces observers encountered during their childhood. We recruited undergraduate observers from small (500-1000 individuals) and large communities (30,000-100,000 individuals) and asked them to complete a standard face memory test and a basic ERP paradigm designed to elicit a robust N170 response, including the classic face inversion effect. We predicted that growing up in a small community might lead to diminished face memory and an N170 response that was less specific to faces. These predictions were confirmed, suggesting that the sheer number of faces one can interact with during their upbringing shapes their behavioral abilities and the functional architecture of face processing in the brain.