African Versus Caucasian Faces in a Visual Expectation Paradigm: A Longitudinal Study With German and Cameroonian Infants

This article focuses on sequence learning on the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) using human faces as stimulus material. For a sample of 133 Caucasian German infants assessed longitudinally at 3 and 6 months of age, a previous study has shown that the response latency of 6-month-old infants was shorter when the infants solved the task with Caucasian own-race faces in contrast to African other-race faces. The advantage for own-race faces occurs at the same age the Other-Race-Effect (ORE) has been reported to emerge. As studies on ORE development have shown the phenomenon in infants from various cultural backgrounds, the follow-up question to be answered here is whether the performance differences on the VExP can also be found in other than Caucasian infants. As a complement to the German sample, 30 African infants from Cameroon were assessed longitudinally with the same VExP task at ages 3 and 6 months. Our results indicate that perception differences between own-race and other-race faces influence performance on the VExP in both samples. As expected, the Cameroonian infants improved performance on the VExP from 3 to 6 months only in their own-race African faces condition.