Cross-Race Preferences for Same-Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3-Month-Old Infants

A visual preference procedure was used to examine preferences among faces of

different races and ethnicities (African, Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern) in

Chinese 3-month-old infants exposed only to Chinese faces. The infants demonstrated

a preference for faces from their own ethnic group. Alongside previous

results showing that Caucasian infants exposed only to Caucasian faces prefer

same-race faces (Kelly et al., 2005) and that Caucasian and African infants exposed

only to native faces prefer the same over the other-race faces (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, &

Hodes, 2006), the findings reported here (a) extend the same-race preference

observed in young infants to a new race of infants (Chinese), and (b) show that

cross-race preferences for same-race faces extend beyond the perceptually robust

contrast between African and Caucasian faces.