The Social Brain Flashcards
Hallucinations
common effect of solo sailing, sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and bereavement of a spouse
One of most common hallucinations in social isolation is the hallucination of other people
Contact with others is so important to people that the reaction to prolonged periods without contact can be to imagine other people.
Obligate Social Species:
Obligate Social Species: Species in which individuals must be with others in order to survive and are co-evolved in order to interact with others.
Avoid the risk of maldevelopment or even death
Evolved to interact:
Evolved to interact: adaptations appropriate to solve adaptive problems on multiple sides of a relationship: read and produce facial expressions, seek maternal attachment as infants, provide parental security as adults, produce and comprehend language
ex. Infant has psychological adaptations to attach to mother and mother has adaptations to care for the infant
EEA - social skills crucial to live among other people
friendships, monitor allegiances, insults and exploitation, avoid offense and fulfill obligations
Ostracism would have been deadly
Lone human extremely vulnerable to predation, starvation, exposure and exploitation
Community meant life or death
Spitz - interested in learning about the long-term effects of early social isolation on children - orphanage vs. prison
2 groups of children: orphanage with little consistent human contact and prison where mothers were imprisoned - control for effects of growing up in an institution but compare differences
4m - no differences
1st birthday - children no maternal contact - delayed motor and intellectual development, less playful and explored less, more prone to infection
1-3 yrs - mothered group walk and talk, only 2/26 isolated learned to walk and limited language
Harry Harlow Isolation Experiments
Partial or complete isolation of rhesus monkeys to see effects
Partial: lived in cages where they could hear, smell and see other monkeys but never were physically in contact with them
—–Months of this caused abnormal behavior - self-mutilation, catatonia, pacing or circling
Total social isolation: isolation chamber - no experience with other monkeys, couldn’t hear or smell them, non-social needs were met
—30 days in total isolation - enormously disturbed
—1 year - no longer played, explored or rarely moved
—⅙ monkeys for 3m stopped eating and died
When these monkeys became mothers they were incapable of effective parenting and were either neglectful or abusive to their infants
—–Most mothers ignored their infants but some were actively violent towards them
Harry Harlow Isolation Experiment - Rehabilitation Attempts
Attempted to rehabilitate monkeys in total social isolation but not very successful
Placed total social isolation monkeys with normal ones and found severe deficits in every aspect of social behavior
Given to surrogate mothers and showed some improvement but still had social deficits
Most successful therapy - pairing them with a normally reared monkey who was younger - Paired with 3m monkeys - eliminated deficits
poor maternal skills relative to monkeys who were reared by their mothers.
Isolated monkeys were likely to show abusive behavior or to be indifferent towards their own infants. Those who had experience with peers were better mothers than those who had been raised in complete isolation.
Maternal skills did improve with later born infants in cases where the mother had more than one
Brain is costly: - 2
- Brain tissue is expensive energetically and is prioritized above other kinds of tissue when resources are scarce
- The human baby is born 9m early so that the baby’s head can fit through the mother’s pelvis at birth
Why is the human brain so big?
- Ecological Pressures: Evolutionary pressures that derive from ecological circumstances, including the availability of resources and the presence of risks or dangers.
- Social Brain hypothesis: The idea that the large brains of humans, as well as the general intelligence of humans, has evolved in response to social conflicts and challenges that are an inherent part of group living
—-Need a lot of intelligence because of the social cognitive challenges - names, hierarchy, trade, allies, enemies, understand group interactions
Social integration and intelligence probably evolved together, reinforcing each other in an ever-increasing spiral
Selection pressure for social skills
Evidence supports the social brain hypothesis over the ecological hypothesis
Dunbar - humans tended to congregate in groups of about 150 - evolved to have relationships with 150 ppl - want to know major events - close enough connection - want to update and be updated
A hundred and fifty is a large number of people to individuate, remember, have mental impressions of, track favors and insults from, and remember the values and desires of - evolved to do this
In groups larger than that, we are less able to keep track of all of the relationships.
primates rarely live in groups larger than 50
size of a species’ neocortex
(the “newest” part of the brain, associated with relatively high-level cognitive processing)
Correlates with GROUP SIZE
Correlates with CLIQUE SIZE , that is, the individuals you hang out with on a day-to-day basis
DECEPTION USE is used is correlated with neocortex size
Does not correlate with any measure of ecological demands, such as the size of the home range
Herding animals
Humans social cognitive demands are greater than, say, fish, birds, sheep or other herding animals that spend their time in large groups -didn’t experience selection pressure favoring social cognition - not the same social complexity
congregate in order to protect themselves from predators, but they do not know each other as individuals, except perhaps for mother and offspring
Humans - recognize individuals, form alliances, hierarchies, deception
Shultz and Dunbar
Not just the size of the group but also the longevity and complexity of social relationships that should predict brain size.
Bird groups, an individual may come and go without any apparent social obligation interfering with its between-group mobility.
Membership is stable over time, and belonging to a group has value to an individual- One would not be equally welcome in a different group should he choose to abandon the current group
bonded social structure
brain size (controlled for body size) is related to the amount of time spent in social activity during the day and the extent to which a species has a “bonded social structure,” meaning the extent to which two individuals develop a committed relationship
Social Complexity and Brain Size
brain size increases with the complexity of the social group, progressing from solitary to pair-bonded (a male–female couple), to a sole-male, multifemale harem to a multi-male group
Brain size is correlated with
Deception
Longevity and complexity of social relationships
Coalition size - who alliance is
Bonded social structure - male and female that are partners
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - Three Mountain Task
Preoperational stage: Egocentrism: Piaget’s term for a child’s inability to appreciate other points of view besides their own.
THREE MOUNTAIN TASK
When asked to select pictures of what the doll could see, young children typically selected the photo showing their own vantage point.
Children younger than 9 or 10 years old - couldn’t understand viewpoints
Piaget took this as evidence of their extreme egocentrism.- failure understanding other’s mental states- different knowledge and have visual access to different objects, a sign of social cognitive immaturity
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - Egocentrism in Speech
Preschool-aged children routinely report events without providing enough information for the listener to understand - i broke it - whats it?
“parallel” conversation, which at first sounds like a regular conversation until you realize that they are not responding to each other’s content. A child may respond to “We went to the beach yesterday” with “My grandma has three cats.”
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - animism was
related to egocentrism
Attribution of mental states to inanimate objects (which he called animism) and the attribution of physical and mechanical characteristics to mental entities (which he called realism)
his own child thought the moon was animate because it moved across the sky. - cognitive immaturity.
For Piaget, animism was related to egocentrism: Because the child had a point of view, mental states, and feelings, they attributed such to other objects that they saw in the world and in nature.
The moon, the sun, waterfalls, and other natural objects were seen as goal-directed, intentional characters.
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - egocentrism reexamined
Challenge the idea that infants and young children are completely perceptually bound and that they do not understand that others may be able to see things that they cannot see themselves, or vice versa.
18m - asked to show an adult something when that adult is covering her eyes with her hands. The infant may try to remove the adult’s hands from her face, or to insert the object between the adult’s hands and face- understands that there needs to be a direct line of vision between the adult’s eyes and the object
Flavell - 2 and 3 years - Level 1 understanding of perspective: They know whether or not you can see something but do not know that you may be looking at it differently than they are
- A person’s eyes have to be open and there has to be a clear line of sight in order for the person to see an object.
4 or 5 years - Level 2 understanding: She understands that another person might see an object but see it differently. A picture that lies flat on a table between the two appears right-side up to one person and upside-down to the other
What Would Associationists Say?
Watson believed that children’s personalities and temperaments were determined by their social environments, primarily via simple but general learning mechanisms by 4 or 5 years
Social Learning Theory - emphasizes observation and imitation rather than reward and punishment - know a lot about driving before driving
Where to put the key, what the steering wheel does - learn through observation in a domain that they have never operated in
BANDURA - BOBO DOLL Four-year-old children who watched an adult behave aggressively toward a doll were more likely to attack the doll than children in a control condition. Children even imitated the specific aggressive behaviors of the adult models, including hitting the doll with a mallet, sitting on it and punching it in the face, and kicking it
Human Specific Social Cognition Experiment
humans have species-specific cognitive skills, even compared to our closest relatives
Chimpanzee, orangutan, 2.5 yr old humans
Researchers found that the three groups were equal on performance on the physical cognitive tasks
The human children outperformed adult orangutans and adult chimpanzees on the social cognitive task
evidence that humans have social cognitive skills that are unique to humans - species specific
Psychological Adaptations For Culture
that humans are the only species that can live in virtually all habitats
Unique characteristics of human culture that allows the development of such valuable strategies and technologies is that human culture is cumulative. No one individual could have invented the iPod or the space shuttle.
Generations of communication - could not do this without the social skills human have
Indeed, no individual could have created a bow and arrow or a knit cap.
By adding new innovations to learned innovations, cultures develop gradually and cumulatively.
Social transmission of behavior has been observed in many species - EXAMPLES
EX.
Old female vervet monkey dip an Acacia pod into a pool of water that had gathered in a dead tree. After several minutes, the pod was soft and pliable, and the monkey was able to open it and eat the seeds.
Within nine days, four other monkeys were doing this, and eventually 10 of the monkey’s group members were using this strategy although no vervet monkey, in any group, had been seen doing this before
EX.
Chimpanzees in only one part of the Ivory Coast use stones to open nut shells, and chimpanzees in only one area of Tanzania use twigs or blades of grass to extract and eat termites and ants
Learned songs of male songbirds
Still, culture is unique to humans. Despite examples of social learning in various animals, only humans have cumulative culture because only humans have the cognitive machinery to permit and support the evolution and transmission of culture
Cognitive adaptations that allow for culture
imitation
joint attention
social referencing
intention perception
theory of mind
Tomasello - shared intentionality
Even young infants show interest in other people, behavioral turn-taking, and demonstrate triadic engagement when they attend to the same object that their mother is attending to.
The great apes lack these social cognitive skills, even if they have extensive experience with humans Tomasello suggested that these social psychological skills evolved because they supported cooperative and collaborative interactions.
Imitation
1 day old infants - imitate adults’ facial behaviors such as mouth opening
—-Social behavior since babies do not imitate non-animate objects (e.g., robotic faces or a protruding pencil) producing similar behaviors.
14 m - prefer to look at an adult who is imitating their facial expressions and gestures.
–sat at a table with two adults while each person had the same toy. If the baby picked up the toy and manipulated it
One adult imitated what the infant did
Other adult manipulated the toy in some other way.
The baby smiled more and looked more at the imitating adult than at the other adult.
Babies can discriminate between imitative and non-imitative activity
DYADIC SKILLS:
Imitation, Social smile, protoconversations - verbal exchange that is not yet linguistic, conversational turn taking
9m Revolution
Dyadic Social Competence
Nine-month Revolution: The developmental shift, occurring at nine months, after which infants show triadic social competence. The ability to coordinate the infant’s own perspective and attention with that of another person emerges - meaning they and another person can act on and attend to a third person or another object - triadic
Before this point, infants show dyadic social competence: they interact one-on-one with others, they imitate others, they can engage in proto conversations that involve turn-taking in communication and emotional displays
NEW SKILLS BC OF 9M REV
JOINT ATTENTION: An individual’s ability to tell when she shares an object of attention with another person.
2-12m: ability to follow adult’s eye gaze
9m: Follow pointed finger
Infants both respond to an adult’s bid to
create joint attention (responsive joint
attention)
Issue bids to create joint
attention (initiated joint attention).
evidence of joint attention indicates that the child is aware of mental processes in others - shows that children have some understanding of attention, intention, and affect - evidence of a developing theory of mind
SOCIAL REFERENCING: A young child looking to a trusted authority in situations that are ambiguous with respect to the appropriate response
9-10m: social referencing starts - pet an animal or run away from it - adult looks pleased or fearful
implies that young children can discriminate among different emotional facial expressions and use their perception of expressions to make behavioral decisions.
Animacy and Intentionality Perception
First step in understanding the social world is to categorize objects with which one can have a social understanding or social relationship
Prerequisite to any social cognition
Young children understand: animacy, goals, intentions
Very young infants distinguish between animate and inanimate entities and know that the behavior of others is purposeful and goal-directed.
Animacy perception may be a developmental prerequisite to all social cognition and social understanding
Evidence of Early Animacy Perception
Rochat - 3m & 6m - look at 2 computer displays - BALL CHASING
Two balls moved around on the screen as if they were chasing one another
—-Young infants looked more at this one - interest in a social display over a non-social display - may see these dots as alive
Two balls moved around but did not seem to be interacting
—-Could discriminate displays
Very young children appreciate an animate-inanimate distinction.
7m: unsurprised (as measured by looking time) if a person walks across a stage in front of him but surprised (inferred from increased looking time) if a chair moves entirely on its own across the stage
1yr: unsurprised if a person knocked a ball into a doll but surprised if a ball knocks another ball into the doll, again all indicated by the infant’s looking time
expectation of the kinds of behavior in which a person could engage in, but that an object could not
12m expect rational behavior from intentional objects - ball and barrier
–Or expect the smaller ball to take a direct path to the larger ball now that this path was available with no barrier?,
—-babies dishabituated more to the irrational display of the ball jumping when jumping was unnecessary despite that it was the one they habituated to.
Intention Perception -18m understands a person’s intentions even if his or her intention fails - NOT imitation
watches an adult attempt, but fail, to complete a task such as hanging a ring on a hook or pulling a block off of a stick, the child will complete the task.
Child will complete the task, when the completion of the task was never modeled, suggesting that the child understands the intention.
not the outcome if the child watches a machine complete essentially the same physical movements as the adult model. Watching the machine approximate the task, the child does not perceive a goal and does not pick up the objects and complete the task
Intention Perception - 7m: understand a person’s intentions, even if the actor’s goal is not fulfilled.
Watch an experimenter reach for one of two toys that are just out of reach, the baby will more likely pick up the toy that the actor was reaching for than the other, equally attractive, toy.
This result is not explained simply by the infant’s attention having been drawn to that toy because if the experimenter points to, but does not reach for, the toy, the infant selects one of the two toys by chance, apparently not affected by the experimenter’s actions
Intention Perception - 14m -Infants will infer goals based on people’s behavior
adult-use her forehead to turn on a light while her hands were occupied holding a blanket, the child would use his or her hand to turn on the light, inferring that the adult had a good reason not to use her hands.
Another group saw the adult use her forehead to turn on the light when hands were available. Only children in the second group used their forehead to turn on the light, infer - must be an important reason to do so
Interpreting her mental state
Intention Perception - 9m - Infants understand goal directed behavior - Amanda Woodward’s Task
Nine-month-old infants watched a hand reach for the teddy bear over and over until they habituated.
Position of the two toys was switched - surprise (looked longer) when the hand reached for a different toy, even though the path of the reach was what they had habituated to.
No dishabituation if they saw the hand reach for the old toy in a new location. Infants had inferred that the teddy bear was the goal and expected the hand to again reach for that goal.
9m: understands the actor’s intentions- did not replicate if the “arm” looked mechanical or could bend in a way that made it look non-human - infant did not perceive a human with mental states, so did not infer a goal on the basis of the action, and therefore had no expectations about where the entity would reach when the two toys switched locations.
Intention Perception: 11m - Infants parse other people’s actions from a continuous stream of movement.
Someone pick a dishtowel up off the floor, hang it up, and then pick up a glass of water from the counter - three discrete acts - person who performs these three acts is likely in constant motion - does not pause once each of these three goals is achieved.
Infants dishabituated to the movie in which a pause appeared in mid-act but not to the movie in which the pause appeared at the completion of an act (as if they had already imagined a pause there) - infant understood the actor’s intention
Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind: The part of our psychological processes that allows us to understand another person’s mental states
By watching people’s behaviors, we can understand mental states such as beliefs, desires, and goals, and we can tell whether they are pretending
understand people’s mental states -use our knowledge of these mental states to understand and predict people’s behaviors.
12m - know a great deal about how people’s behaviors are related to their goals and intentions, early precursors of theory of mind.
The Appearance-Reality Distinction
Test by seeing if children could tell that an object could look like on thing but actually be something else
Sponge that looks like a rock
Only looking - report rock
Feel, look and squeeze - realize its a sponge
The critical question, then, is whether the child could then report that the object appears to be a rock, or was that representation completely overwritten upon discovering that the object is a sponge?
3yrs baffled - can’t appreciate appearance and reality simultaneously - report its a sponge and it’s always looked like one
6-7yrs understand distinction and recognize there can be a difference btw appearance and reality - difficult to discuss what the difference is
11-12yrs - adept at discussing the appearance-reality distinction
False-Belief Task
a task in which a child must appreciate a character’s false belief in order to predict or explain that character’s behavior
If the child is a typical 5-year-old, she will reply “Smarties” because she understands that Bobby will have a false belief.
However, a 3-year old will reply “pencils” - fails to appreciate that Bobby has not had access to the information about the pencils and does not appreciate that Bobby will have a false belief.
Unlike the 5-year-old -PASSES, the 3-year-old has not shown evidence of understanding that Bobby has mental states at all. The child’s theory of mind is still immature.
Evidence of theory of mind in 15m olds
actor place a toy in a green box - the toy was revealed and either placed back in the green box or moved to a yellow box - happened either while the actor was looking or while the actor was not looking.
Four conditions: two in which the actor had a true belief and two in which the actor had a false belief, crossed with two in which the toy had moved to a new location and two in which the toy had been placed back in the original location.
During test trials, the infants saw the actor reach into either the green or the yellow box. Results clearly showed evidence of an appreciation of the actor’s belief and the role belief plays in predicting the actor’s behavior
looking time was greater in cases where the actor looked in the right location- expected the action to be guided by the belief, whether the belief was true or not.
Evidence of Theory of mind in 13m olds
13-month-old infants watch as a caterpillar first established a preferred food item: The caterpillar consistently chose either an apple or a piece of cheese when each was hidden behind a screen
test trial, the locations of the apple and the cheese were switched and placed in the opposite location from the training trial.
If the screen was low and the food was visible, the infant was surprised if the caterpillar approached the non-preferred food: the caterpillar was expected to approach her preferred food.
screen was high enough to occlude the food, the infant was surprised if the caterpillar approached the preferred food (how did she know it was there when its location had been switched?) - expect one’s beliefs to guide one’s actions
LIMITATIONS theory of mind
- Difficult to develop a measure of theory of mind that is sensitive enough to measure theory of mind development past early childhood.
- Even adults sometimes show theory of mind failure. In one experiment, one participant was required to describe an object to another participant but failed to take into account the receiver’s perspective when doing so.
Theory of Mind in Non-Humans
What experimental results would convince you that the animal is mentalizing and has not just made an association?
If a dog is forbidden to take food, that dog will attempt to take food less often if a person is looking at him than if the person is looking away, has her back turned, or is involved in a different activity - suggests that a dog understands attention
Chimps - request food from one of two experimenters, one who knows where the food is and one who does not know where the food is, they are more likely to request food from the experimenter who knows where the food is -understand mental states
Whether this ability is the same as the human theory of mind is an open question, but recent research seems to suggest that a theory of mind is not necessary to explain non-human primates’ behavior because the null hypothesis, associationism, has not been falsified
Autism - What if there were no theory of mind?
Autism: A developmental disorder that is defined and characterized by a deficits in:
- Social communication and interactions
- Restricted pattern of behaviors and interests.
Baron-Cohen first proposed that a deficit in theory of mind development was a defining feature of autism
Typical children develop the ability to identify objects that are animate as a precursor to the theory of mind mechanism (ToMM).
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a deficit in the development of this capability, measurable by a relative inability to distinguish objects engaged in animate versus inanimate motion
Adults with ASD are less likely than a control group to attribute social and personality characteristics to simple geometric shapes that are acting out a social scenario.
Autism -Deficits in Joint attention and Imitation
Possible to see this difference as early as 18m and even 12m
Children with ASD are impaired both in the production of (initiated) joint-attention and in the comprehension of (responsive) joint-attention gestures such as pointing and in their ability to follow an adult’s eye gaze
Difficulty with False-Belief tasks ex. Sally-Anne and smarties
False-photo test
Were children with ASD failing the false-belief task
Due to difficulty understanding mental states
Due to trouble with the logical structure of the problem?
Probe the child’s understanding by asking whether the photograph shows the current configuration or the past configuration
Children with ASD did not have difficulty with the false-photograph task. Indeed, their performance on the false-photograph task tends to exceed that of age-matched controls
Deficit is with theory of mind not with logic
Face Perception in Autism
Trouble with some aspects of face perception and the identification of emotional facial expressions
Differences in face processing appear early in life
Children with ASD may be able to perceive basic emotions they may be doing so using atypical strategies
May be ASD-specific impairments in the recognition of some emotional expressions, specifically anger and disgust, surprise and fear
Greater impairments in lower-functioning ASD individuals in recognition of fear and (less reliably) disgust, happiness, and, to some extent, anger
results regarding emotion recognition in ASD have tended to follow a pattern.
When studies have matched ASD and non-ASD children on non-verbal IQ, ASD children tend to show impairments in recognition of emotions
However, when the groups are matched on verbal IQ, deficits in emotion perception are not found
Looking at eyes ASD
ASD does not attend to eyes preferentially
Attending to the eyes is important for processing information that is available on a person’s face and particularly important for understanding complex mental states
Results showed that for complex emotions, seeing just the eyes is as informative as seeing the whole face for the control group.
People with ASD were not as able to use information from the eye region to correctly identify the emotion, especially for the subset of emotions that were complex and that required thinking about a person’s mental state.
Possible that those with ASD develop strategies to compensate for the difficulty in the recognition of emotional expressions - in order to solve social perceptual tasks, people with ASD use a less intuitive, more deliberate strategy in which individual features are examined
More tolerant of extremely exaggerated facial expressions than typical individuals - consistent with the idea that they are using a rule-based strategy for emotion recognition rather than the template-based strategy used by individuals with a history of typical development
A Social Orienting View of Autism
Children with ASD do not show the same social developmental trajectory as other children.
In their first year of life, they orient themselves to social information less than other children do and, subsequently, do not show the same theory of mind development as other children.
Cause of the deficits in social cognitive development in ASD is an early failure to orient preferentially to social stimuli
theory predicts less attention to eyes, eye gaze, emotional facial expressions, animate and biological motion, tone of voice, and pointing, all of which result in differences in social development.
Deficit in processes that orient to and gather social information, then the developing social cognitive processes do not get what they need for typical development and thus do not develop typically- conceptually similar to deprived kitten example
Positive Effects of Autism Research
Early measures of social orienting have the potential to lead to earlier identification of children developing with ASD.
Training interventions correcting deficits in social orienting may enhance social cognitive development.
Test some hypotheses about typical development
Test whether specific cognitive skills are developmental precursors to later-developing cognitive skills.
Play
How a child spends most of his or her waking hours
Children do not need any explicit instruction in order to engage in play activity. They create play for themselves and watch and imitate play behavior in peers
Evolutionary Psychologists: Play is adaptive - the extent to which children have an opportunity to play is associated with later social skills and problem solving
Piaget - 2 types of Play
Sensorimotor Play - manipulation of objects, in order to master the skills associated with tool use
Pretend Play - creating representations of imagined actions, objects or characters
Pretend Play
Stimulative or non-literal play - acting as if something is the case when it is not
Pretending if she is using one object to substitute for an imagined object - attributing imagined properties to an object or attributing agency to a doll or another object
Piaget: Pretend play as practice for events in the child’s social world
Emerges at 18m - becomes more elaborate and sophisticated through preschool years
Sophisticated and complex cognitive accomplishment - pretend phone is banana
Banana as banana and banana as telephone and must understand mental states - understand that partner has these two mental representations simultaneously
Sociodramatic Play - Vygotsky
Sociodramatic Play: Pretend play in which the child adopts the role of a particular character.
Children tend to act out a script or an agreed upon scenario.
This type of play is most frequent among 3- and 4-year-olds, although older children who engage in sociodramatic play are able to enact more complex and involved scenes.
Vygotsky - crucial to social emotional and cognitive development
Children spontaneously engaged in sociodramatic play because they were practicing roles that they would hold later in life
Child is not just practicing behaviors but actively learning about social norms and expectations as common social scenarios are played out
Learning and practicing the social rules that are inherent to the pretend situation
Imaginary Friends
Taylor - imaginary friends are normal - more than 63% of children have played with an imaginary friend at some point in childhood
Imaginary companions often take the form of friends who are about the same age as the child and often the same sex
But some take a different form - animals - person of a different age
Some were not actually friends
Children with imaginary friends are less shy not more shy than other children
Could be that these children are particularly social and have enough interest in social others to have both real friends and imaginary friends
Other Race Effect:
Other Race Effect: The characteristic of human face perception wherein members of one’s own race are more perceptually distinct than members of another race.
Not racism, or indifference on the part of the majority group to individuals in ethnic minority groups - developmental result of a lifetime of exposure to faces belonging to members of one group more than faces of another group.
Reflect the differences in the amount of time an individual has spent with various races while growing up
Other race effect and perceptual narrowing
Example of perceptual narrowing: when people see few other-race faces, the ability to perceptually discriminate among them collapses.
Clue to the role of face exposure to the development of the other race effect is the finding that increased exposure to a particular race results in a reduction of confusion of other-race faces
EX. Caucasian children who grow up in segregated neighborhoods show the other race effect to a greater extent than do Caucasian children who grow up in racially integrated neighborhoods
ORE - Role of Experience
Study included 3 groups: Caucasians who grew up in France, ethnic Korean individuals who were adopted as children (the average age at adoption was 6 years) into a French family and grew up in France, and Koreans who grew up in Korea and came to France as adults
Shown a face image then shown two side by side images - presented until observer indicates which face they have seen
Results showed that while the French observers were better at recognizing Caucasian faces, Korean observers were better at recognizing Korean faces.
ethnic Koreans who grew up in France surrounded by Caucasian faces were better at recognizing Caucasian than Asian faces, suggesting that lifetime experience plays an important role in the development of the other-race effect
when does ore develop for infants in mono-racial with little exposure
Effect develops within the first year of life at least for infants in a mono-racial society with little exposure to the faces of different races
Greater ability to discriminate same-race faces compared to other-race faces by the age of in mono racial
3m - evidence of a same-race preference in mono-racial environment
Effect becomes more robust by 9m
other race effect develops across the first year, it can be attenuated by exposure to other race faces
Effect was eliminated in Caucasion 3m after 2min of exposure to 3 asian faces
Eliminating the effect took 70 min of training at 6m of age
Eliminating effect took 100-155 minutes at 8-10 months of age
Voices
Accent is an even stronger determinant of social categorization than visible cues to race
5YR OLDS - EEA - one would have heard other accents but not seen other race faces
Want to be friends with the kid who speaks their own language - even if they both said it in english
Social categorization - can override a preference for race
No audio just see the face - white participants choose the white kids
Add audio - choose the american accent
Voice is more important to social categorization than race for these 5 yr old subjects
10m sensitive to accent
Accept toy from own-language speaker - take from english speaking experimenter
