Infant Social Learning Generalization Based On Face Race And Reliability

In daily life,we have asymmetrical experience with own-versus other-race faces.As one of the familiar categories,race information affects the trait inference of adults.Adults may generalize a particular trait of one person to other person to other-race category relative to own-race category.However,It is not clear when this phenomenon occurs,and whether it is stable in various reliability situations.In order to answer this question,the research examines how infant use experiences with own-race and other-race members to learn from novel,unknown group members in different reliability situation.The experiment 1 examined the generalization of infants' selective learning in the uncertain situation(50%).The results showed that infants follow the gaze of the novel own-race adult more than the other-race one.The experiment 2 examined the generalization of infants' selective learning in the unreliable situation(25%).The results showed that infants follow the gaze of the novel own-race adult more than the other-race one.The experiment 3 examined the generalization of infants' selective learning in the reliable situation(100%).The results showed that infants follow the gaze of both novel own-race and other-race adult.This result indicated that the generalization of selective social learning of 8-12 months infants was influenced by race and reliability.In uncertain and unreliable situations,infants showed member-to-member generalization to other-race category relative to own-race category.In a reliable situation,infants showed member-to-member generalization to own-race and other-race categories.This result can be explained by the infants' ability to distinguish individuals to own-race and other-race categories.This suggests that there may be a linkage between the perceptual processing and social processing of face race in infancy..Moreover,the results of this study are based on the generalized performance of infants and provide some inspiration for the elimination of early social bias and social learning..