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A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact

Poor recognition of other-race faces is ubiquitous around the world. We resolve a longstanding contradiction in the literature concerning whether interracial social contact improves the other-race effect. For the first time, we measure the age at which contact was experienced. Taking advantage of un...

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Autores principales: McKone, Elinor, Wan, Lulu, Pidcock, Madeleine, Crookes, Kate, Reynolds, Katherine, Dawel, Amy, Kidd, Evan, Fiorentini, Chiara
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6731249/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31492907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49202-0
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author McKone, Elinor
Wan, Lulu
Pidcock, Madeleine
Crookes, Kate
Reynolds, Katherine
Dawel, Amy
Kidd, Evan
Fiorentini, Chiara
author_facet McKone, Elinor
Wan, Lulu
Pidcock, Madeleine
Crookes, Kate
Reynolds, Katherine
Dawel, Amy
Kidd, Evan
Fiorentini, Chiara
author_sort McKone, Elinor
collection PubMed
description Poor recognition of other-race faces is ubiquitous around the world. We resolve a longstanding contradiction in the literature concerning whether interracial social contact improves the other-race effect. For the first time, we measure the age at which contact was experienced. Taking advantage of unusual demographics allowing dissociation of childhood from adult contact, results show sufficient childhood contact eliminated poor other-race recognition altogether (confirming inter-country adoption studies). Critically, however, the developmental window for easy acquisition of other-race faces closed by approximately 12 years of age and social contact as an adult — even over several years and involving many other-race friends — produced no improvement. Theoretically, this pattern of developmental change in plasticity mirrors that found in language, suggesting a shared origin grounded in the functional importance of both skills to social communication. Practically, results imply that, where parents wish to ensure their offspring develop the perceptual skills needed to recognise other-race people easily, childhood experience should be encouraged: just as an English-speaking person who moves to France as a child (but not an adult) can easily become a native speaker of French, we can easily become “native recognisers” of other-race faces via natural social exposure obtained in childhood, but not later.
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spelling pubmed-67312492019-09-18 A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact McKone, Elinor Wan, Lulu Pidcock, Madeleine Crookes, Kate Reynolds, Katherine Dawel, Amy Kidd, Evan Fiorentini, Chiara Sci Rep Article Poor recognition of other-race faces is ubiquitous around the world. We resolve a longstanding contradiction in the literature concerning whether interracial social contact improves the other-race effect. For the first time, we measure the age at which contact was experienced. Taking advantage of unusual demographics allowing dissociation of childhood from adult contact, results show sufficient childhood contact eliminated poor other-race recognition altogether (confirming inter-country adoption studies). Critically, however, the developmental window for easy acquisition of other-race faces closed by approximately 12 years of age and social contact as an adult — even over several years and involving many other-race friends — produced no improvement. Theoretically, this pattern of developmental change in plasticity mirrors that found in language, suggesting a shared origin grounded in the functional importance of both skills to social communication. Practically, results imply that, where parents wish to ensure their offspring develop the perceptual skills needed to recognise other-race people easily, childhood experience should be encouraged: just as an English-speaking person who moves to France as a child (but not an adult) can easily become a native speaker of French, we can easily become “native recognisers” of other-race faces via natural social exposure obtained in childhood, but not later. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-09-06 /pmc/articles/PMC6731249/ /pubmed/31492907 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49202-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
McKone, Elinor
Wan, Lulu
Pidcock, Madeleine
Crookes, Kate
Reynolds, Katherine
Dawel, Amy
Kidd, Evan
Fiorentini, Chiara
A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
title A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
title_full A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
title_fullStr A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
title_full_unstemmed A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
title_short A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
title_sort critical period for faces: other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6731249/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31492907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49202-0
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