The Role Of Race Categories On Infant's Selective Social Learning

Much of human knowledge comes from learning from others.It is crucial that children selectively learn from others.Children and infants rely on a lot of clues to determine who to learn,such as familiarity,reliability,age,and so on.Familiarity affects individual's perceptual processing and social processing.As one of the familiarity clues of the informants,race information not only affect the face discrimination and face categorization of infants,but also affect the selective social learning of infants.9-month infants can form a concept of racial category,and they can classify the individual faces of the same race into the same racial category.So,what is the selective social learning of infants at the level of racial category? In other words,after learning information provided by different individuals the same race,can infants generalize the learned information to the new individual of this race?In order to solve this problem,this study used gaze-cuing paradigm to investigate infants' selective learning from own-race and other-race in the context of uncertain and certain situation.The role of racial categories on infant selective learning is further explored.The study 1 examined the selective social learning in the context of uncertainty of information reliability(50%),which provided by the own-race and other-race face for 9 month infants.The results showed that infants only follow the own-race novel face clues compared with other-race faces.The study 2 examined the selective social learning in the context of certainty of information reliabilities(100%/25%),which provided by the own-race and other-race face for 9 month infants.The results showed that 1)If the information provided by ownrace and other-race both were very reliable(reliability is 100%),both the own-race and other-race face clues would be followed by infants,that is,infants' selective learning wouldn't have racial bias in 100% reliability situation.2)If the information provided by own-race and other-race both were unreliable(reliability is 25%),infants only followed the own-race novel face clues compared with other-race face clues.To sum up,the following conclusions are drawn: In different reliability situations,the influence of face race categories on the selective learning of infants is different.This suggests that the difference in infant's perception of the own-race and other-race may be associated with the selective learning to own-race and other-race.