 The human face plays an important role in social interactions from the moment you are born. Early perceptual experiences babies have are crucial to the later development of their face processing skills and studies have found that newborns actually have a preference for face-like images over images that do not portray a face at all which shows how prominent the face is within development. This attraction to faces persists into childhood and later into adulthood. One aspect of face perception I am particularly interested in is the "the other-race effect." The other-race effect is defined as a disproportionate impairment in the other-race face recognition as compared to own-race face recognition. What sorts of motivations or experiences can alter this face perception bias for children and adults? I have studied this question with Dr. Scott Johnson at the UCLA Baby Lab and in the future I will possibly be linking this same outlook to how infants distinguish emotions on faces outside and within their own race as well with Dr. Stacey Doan. I am also examining this with adults. I currently have a number of studies examining perceptions of mixed-race or racially ambiguous faces as well as some studies looking at what types of things can affect how a person perceives and/or categorizes racially ambiguous faces. |