Infants show apparent awareness of ethnic differences, UCLA psychologists report
*Here’s something to wrap your mind around on a Wednesday. I think babies detect differences, but the authors of the study and the article are the ones who imposed ethnicity on those differences. And yet, that differentiation is what can lead to learned bigotry and discrimination, or learned tolerance and acceptance. VL
By Stuart Wolpert, UCLA Newsroom (3.5 minute read) 
Infants less than a year old, who have yet to learn language, appear to notice differences when looking at adult women of different ethnicities, a new study by UCLA psychologists shows.
Researchers studied 40 Hispanic infants and 37 non-Hispanic white infants, all 11 months old. The researchers showed them the faces of 18 young women they did not know on a computer screen, two at a time, side-by-side — six African-American, six Hispanic and six non-Hispanic white.
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Recording the infants’ eye movements with technology that can track where a viewer is looking, and for how long, the results showed that both Hispanic and white infants looked longer at African-American faces than Hispanic faces, longer at African-American faces than white faces and longer at Hispanic faces than white faces.
By Stuart Wolpert, UCLA Newsroom (3.5 minute read)
[Photo courtesy of UCLA nEWSROOM]
