SBP: The Emergence of Social Biases in Infancy

这个项目研究社会偏见的发展起源。在他们的第一个生日之前，婴儿更喜欢来自熟悉种族群体的人和说母语的人。这些偏见与社会经验有关：与社会多样性接触较多的婴儿对来自不熟悉群体的人的偏见较少。拟议的研究将通过创新方法对引起婴儿社会偏见的机制进行新的阐述：（1）评估婴儿偏见的情感和认知方面，（2）调查所涉及的神经系统，（3）确定社会经验的方面可能对建立社会偏见很重要。这些发现将为如何减轻社会偏见的负面影响提供见解，并开发新的研究工具，用于研究早期发育过程中行为，大脑和社会经验之间的关系。该项目的一个主要目标是解决少数民族在认知发展研究方面缺乏研究的问题。为了更好地理解社会偏见是如何在人类经验的多样性中出现的，研究将涉及来自少数民族和多数民族背景的同等数量的婴儿。先前的研究表明，婴儿的视觉偏好表达了社会偏见，但所涉及的认知和情感过程，以及相关的社会和神经机制知之甚少。该项目通过将一套创新的行为，神经和社会措施与9个月大的婴儿研究结合在一起来解决这些悬而未决的问题。在六项研究中，婴儿将与来自不同语言和种族群体的人在一起，婴儿的大脑活动（EEG：额颞θ; μ节律;额叶α不对称）和行为反应（注意力，学习，模仿和接近-退缩倾向）将被比较熟悉与不熟悉的社会群体成员。婴儿社会环境的多样性将通过社区人口普查数据和父母调查来评估，以评估婴儿密切的社交网络。这项研究将为婴儿社会偏见的性质以及导致这些偏见的条件提供基本的新见解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project investigates the developmental origins of social bias. Before their first birthdays, infants prefer people from familiar racial groups and people who speak their native language. These biases are related to social experience: Infants who have more contact with social diversity are less biased against people from unfamiliar groups. The proposed studies will shed new light on the mechanisms that give rise to infants’ social biases by innovating methods to: (1) assess the emotional and cognitive aspects of infants’ biases, (2) investigate the neural systems involved, and (3) identify the aspects of social experience that may be important for establishing social bias. The findings will provide insights into how to mitigate the negative consequences of social biases, as well as developing new research tools for studying relations between behavior, brain and social experience during early development. A major goal of this project is to address the dearth of research with minority populations in cognitive development research. Studies will involve equal numbers of infants from minority and majority backgrounds in order to better understand how social biases emerge across the diversity of human experience.Prior research indicates that infants’ visual preferences express social bias, but the cognitive and affective processes involved, and the associated social and neural mechanisms are poorly understood. This project addresses these open issues by bringing together an innovative set of behavioral, neural and social measures in research with 9-month-old infants. Across six studies, infants will be presented with people from different linguistic and racial groups and infants’ brain activity (EEG: frontal-temporal theta; mu rhythm; frontal alpha asymmetry) and behavioral responses (attention, learning, imitation, and approach-withdrawal tendencies) to members of familiar vs. unfamiliar social groups will be compared. The diversity in infants’ social environments will be assessed via neighborhood census data and a parent survey to assess infants’ close social networks. This research will provide fundamental new insights into the nature of infants’ social biases and the conditions that contribute to them. The multidisciplinary approach will inform scientific understanding of brain-behavior-environment relations during early development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.