Exploring the Impact of Exposure to Age Groups on the Development of the Other-Race Effect in Infancy While Assessing the Qualities of Online and In-Person Data Collection

As part of the cognitive developmental processes, infants categorize visual stimuli in order to make sense of and become familiar with the world they live in. However, one pattern of such a tendency that develops at just 3 months of age is the other-race effect (ORE), an extension of such categorization that applies to groups of people based on race, which can be formed and manipulated by the unequal exposure to certain racial groups. This would result in the tendency to recognize faces of the individual’s own race or faces of racial groups in which the infant has more exposure to and process them more easily as compared to faces of different or “other” races in which the individual does not interact with as often. However, it is still unclear whether infants’ looking behavior towards same- and other-race faces has a correlation to the age of the individual whose face is being analyzed. In order to investigate this question, we conducted a visual-paired comparison experiment to examine 12-month-old infants’ gaze behavior towards same-race and different-race faces, either adult female faces or young adolescent faces. Additionally, we sought to address the quality of data collection by comparing the methods of the tradition in-person laboratory data collection and the recently developed Look-It platform for online data collection spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.