Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues From Own-Race Than Other-Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty
- Rachel Wu contributed equally with Naiqi G. Xiao, thus sharing the first authorship with Naiqi G. Xiao.
- This research was supported by grants from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD046526), the National Science Foundation of China (31070908, 31300860, 31470993, and 31671146), and the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LY16C90006). We thank Lauren L. Emberson and three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and Xiaoli Jiao and Jun Li for their assistance in data collection.
Abstract
Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has downstream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (range = 5.9–8.5 months; N = 96) use gaze from own- versus other-race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an event's occurrence with 100% reliability, 7-month-olds followed both adults equally; with 25% (chance) reliability, neither was followed. However, with 50% (uncertain) reliability, infants followed own- over other-race gaze. Differential face race experience may thus affect how infants use social cues from own- versus other-race adults for learning. Such findings suggest that infants integrate online statistical reliability information with prior knowledge of own versus other race to guide social interaction and learning.