Little is known about how infants born and raised in a multiracial environment process own- and other-race faces. We investigated face recognition of 3- to 4-month-old (N = 36) and 8- to 9-month-old (N = 38) Chinese infants from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a population that is considered multiracial, using female and male faces that are of infants' own-race (Chinese), experienced other-race (Malay) and less experienced other-race (Caucasian-White). Three- to 4-month-olds recognized own-race female faces, whereas 8- to 9-month-olds also recognized experienced other-race female faces (Malay) in addition to own-race female faces (Chinese). Furthermore, infants from this population did not show recognition for male faces at any age. This contrasts with 8- to 9-month-old British-White infants (Tham, Bremner, & Hay, ), a group that is considered single-race, who recognized female and male own-race faces. It appears that for infants born and raised in a multiracial environment, there is a developmental shift from a female-based own-race recognition advantage to a female-based own- and experienced other-race advantage that may relate to infants' social and caregiving experiences.
Amodal (redundant) and arbitrary cross-sensory feature associations involve the context-insensitive mapping of absolute feature values across sensory domains. Cross-sensory associations of a different kind, known as correspondences, involve the context-sensitive mapping of relative feature values. Are such correspondences in place at birth (like amodal associations), or are they learned from subsequently experiencing relevant feature co-occurrences in the world (like arbitrary associations)? To decide between these two possibilities, human newborns (median age = 44 hr) watched animations in which two balls alternately rose and fell together in space. The pitch of an accompanying sound rose and fell either congruently with this visual change (pitch rising and falling as the balls moved up and down), or incongruently (pitch rising and falling as the balls moved down and up). Newborns' looking behavior was sensitive to this congruence, providing the strongest indication to date that cross-sensory correspondences can be in place at birth.