Babies' Attention to Different Races

For babies ages 8-11 months who were born at full term (37+ weeks) and have not participated in this study before.

Your child will watch videos of people varying in race/ethnicity. They will be presented side-by-side, either in silence or grasping a toy. We will measure how long your child looks at these videos. We will ask you (the parent) to close your eyes or look down to avoid influencing your child's responses. We will also ask you to fill out a demographic survey and answer a few optional questions about your neighborhood.

While younger infants usually prefer to look at familiar-race faces relative to unfamiliar-race faces, older infants tend to display an opposite preference. In this study, we are investigating whether these tendencies persist across a range of races/ethnicities, and how babies’ experience with people from different races/ethnicities influences their attentional preferences. We are also interested in studying how the type of stimuli presented (e.g., still pictures vs. actions) influences babies’ selective attention based on race/ethnicity, with the aim of better understanding the function of these attentional biases.

15 minutes

After you finish the study, we will email you a $20 Amazon gift card within approximately a week. You can earn an additional $20 Amazon gift card if you fill out an optional, external survey linked at the end of the study. To be eligible for the gift card, your baby should not have completed this study before, your child must be in the age range for this study, you need to submit a valid consent statement, and we need to see that there is a child with you. We will send a gift card even if you do not finish the whole study or we are not able to use your child's data.