Understanding the link between categorization of native and non-native faces and Ingroup preferences: a developmental approach – IGBDEV

People have an implicit tendency to perceive and treat other members of their in-group more positively: Ingroup Preferece (IGP). Its emergence and development remains unclear. 9-month-olds are doing both perceptual and social categories for individuals. We will explore the interactions between face and speech processing in the context of the development of the IGP. In infants, we will test the hypothesis that hearing the native language in combination with looking at an own-race face versus hearing a non-native language combined with another-race face boosts the IGP. In a second part, we will not only record electroencephalography (EEG) during frequency-tagging, providing implicit quantifiable measures of IGP objectively comparable across development, but also test for evidence of interactions between face and speech processing in the context of the IGP in adults and infants. Our results will be key for understanding how infants represent their social world and determining the factors influencing their representation of others and the emergence of IGP.