PLoS ONE 6(4): e18621. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018621
Caucasian Infants Scan Own- and Other-Race Faces Differently
Andrea Wheeler et al. Young infants are known to prefer own-race
faces to other race faces and recognize own-race faces better
than other-race faces. However, it is entirely unclear as to
whether infants also attend to different parts of own- and
other-race faces differently, which may provide an important
clue as to how and why the own-race face recognition advantage
emerges so early. The present study used eye tracking
methodology to investigate whether 6- to 10-month-old Caucasian
infants (N = 37) have differential scanning patterns for
dynamically displayed own- and other-race faces. We found that
even though infants spent a similar amount of time looking at
own- and other-race faces, with increased age, infants
increasingly looked longer at the eyes of own-race faces and
less at the mouths of own-race faces. These findings suggest
experience-based tuning of the infant's face processing sys