Krasotkina Anna, Götz Antonia, Höhle Barbara, Schwarzer Gudrun
Department of Developmental Psychology, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, 35394 Giessen, Germany.
Department Linguistics, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany.
Brain Sci. 2020 May 29;10(6):331. doi: 10.3390/brainsci10060331.
The other-race effect (ORE) can be described as difficulties in discriminating between faces of ethnicities other than one's own, and can already be observed at approximately 9 months of age. Recent studies also showed that infants visually explore same-and other-race faces differently. However, it is still unclear whether infants' looking behavior for same- and other-race faces is related to their face discrimination abilities. To investigate this question we conducted a habituation-dishabituation experiment to examine Caucasian 9-month-old infants' gaze behavior, and their discrimination of same- and other-race faces, using eye-tracking measurements. We found that infants looked longer at the eyes of same-race faces over the course of habituation, as compared to other-race faces. After habituation, infants demonstrated a clear other-race effect by successfully discriminating between same-race faces, but not other-race faces. Importantly, the infants' ability to discriminate between same-race faces significantly correlated with their fixation time towards the eyes of same-race faces during habituation. Thus, our findings suggest that for infants old enough to begin exhibiting the ORE, gaze behavior during habituation is related to their ability to differentiate among same-race faces, compared to other-race faces.
异族效应（ORE）可以被描述为辨别自己所属种族以外的其他种族面孔时存在的困难，这种现象在大约9个月大时就已能被观察到。最近的研究还表明，婴儿对同种族和其他种族面孔的视觉探索方式有所不同。然而，婴儿对同种族和其他种族面孔的注视行为是否与他们的面孔辨别能力有关仍不清楚。为了探究这个问题，我们进行了一项习惯化-去习惯化实验，使用眼动追踪测量方法来研究9个月大的高加索婴儿对同种族和其他种族面孔的注视行为以及他们对面孔的辨别能力。我们发现，在习惯化过程中，与其他种族面孔相比，婴儿注视同种族面孔眼睛的时间更长。习惯化后，婴儿通过成功辨别同种族面孔而非其他种族面孔，表现出了明显的异族效应。重要的是，婴儿辨别同种族面孔的能力与他们在习惯化过程中对同种族面孔眼睛的注视时间显著相关。因此，我们的研究结果表明，对于年龄足够大、开始表现出异族效应的婴儿来说，习惯化过程中的注视行为与他们区分同种族面孔和其他种族面孔的能力有关。
