Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants’ visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate between novel and familiarized Asian faces at the beginning of testing were given brief daily experience with Asian female faces in the experimental condition and Caucasian female faces in the control condition. At the end of 3 weeks, only infants who received daily experience with Asian females showed above-chance recognition of novel Asian female and male faces. Furthermore, infants in the experimental condition showed greater efficiency in learning novel Asian females compared with infants in the control condition. Thus, visual experience with a novel stimulus category can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing during infancy via improved stimulus recognition and encoding.

► Examine reversibility of infants’ perceptual narrowing in other-race recognition. ► Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds could not initially recognize Asian faces. ► Only infants given daily exposure to Asian females learned to recognize Asian faces. ► These infants learned to recognize both female and male Asian faces. ► Infants with no exposure to Asians continued to show poor other-race recognition.