Enhanced Prototype Formation for Other-Race Faces in Infancy: Developmental Trajectories and Environmental Adaptations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Face prototype formation plays a pivotal role in translating face experience into robust internal representations. However, the early developmental trajectory and experiential influences on this cognitive capacity remain underexplored. Across five within-subject experiments conducted in Canada and China across different time periods, we investigated how face race and environmental context modulate infant prototype formation. Using a novel prototype formation paradigm, we discovered infants consistently exhibited stronger prototype formation for unfamiliar other-race faces compared to own-race faces, and this bias increased significantly with age. Furthermore, we demonstrated remarkable plasticity. Infant cohorts tested during and after COVID-19 lockdowns show opposite age-related trajectories in face prototyping, reflecting differential environmental exposure to diverse faces. These findings illuminate the experience-dependent nature of early face processing specialization, suggesting infants’ prototype formation dynamically adapts to optimize face processing within specific environments. We discuss implications for understanding the developmental origins of face processing biases and potential social consequences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".