Cross-Race Preferences for Same-Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3-Month-Old Infants
David J. Kelly
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, England
Shaoying Liu and Liezhong Ge
Department of Psychology, Zheijiang Sci-Tech University, P. R. China
Paul C. Quinn
Department of Psychology, University of Delaware
Alan M. Slater
School of Psychology, University of Exeter, England
Kang Lee
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada
Qinyao Liu
Department of Psychology, Zheijiang Sci-Tech University, P. R. China
Olivier Pascalis
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, England

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