SBP: The Emergence of Social Biases in Infancy

这个项目调查了社会偏见的发展根源。在一岁生日之前，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：与社会多样性有更多接触的婴儿对来自陌生群体的人不那么有偏见。拟议中的研究将通过创新方法来揭示导致婴儿社会偏见的机制：(1)评估婴儿偏见的情感和认知方面，(2)调查涉及的神经系统，以及(3)确定可能对建立社会偏见重要的社会经验方面。这些发现将为如何减轻社会偏见的负面后果提供见解，并为研究早期发展过程中行为、大脑和社会经验之间的关系开发新的研究工具。该项目的一个主要目标是解决认知发展研究中少数群体研究的匮乏问题。研究将包括同等数量的少数族裔和多数族裔背景的婴儿，以更好地理解社会偏见是如何在人类经历的多样性中出现的。之前的研究表明，婴儿的视觉偏好表现出社会偏见，但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、神经和社会测量方法结合起来，对9个月大的婴儿进行研究，解决了这些悬而未决的问题。在六项研究中，婴儿将被呈现给来自不同语言和种族群体的人，并将比较婴儿对熟悉和不熟悉的社会群体成员的大脑活动(脑电：额叶-颞叶theta；Mu节律；额叶阿尔法不对称)和行为反应(注意力、学习、模仿和接近-撤退倾向)。婴儿社交环境的多样性将通过邻里普查数据和父母调查来评估，以评估婴儿密切的社交网络。这项研究将对婴儿的社会偏见的性质和造成这些偏见的条件提供基本的新见解。这种多学科的方法将有助于对早期发育过程中大脑-行为-环境关系的科学理解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.