Infant neural responses to strangers of different races

This study aims to investigate differences in infants’ neural responses to strangers who are of the same (i.e., ingroup) versus different (i.e., outgroup) racial backgrounds. We will examine infants’ neural processing of stranger's reach-to-grasp action. We will also examine infants’ neural responses to strangers from different racial backgrounds as the strangers approach the infant and play peekaboo. We will focus on mu desynchronization as a neural correlate of neural mirroring (Fox et al., 2016), frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) as an indicator of infants’ approach/withdrawal response (Fox et al., 2001), and frontal theta oscillations (Begus et al., 2016; Hwang et al., 2022) as reflecting top-down attention while infants observe actions and social interactions with people from different racial backgrounds. Because exposure to racial diversity influences social group preferences and neural responses to racial ingroup vs. outgroup strangers (Hwang et al., 2022), we will also examine how neighborhood and interpersonal racial diversity might influence infants’ neural responses to outgroup strangers. Further, given that temperament and FAA are correlated (Fox et al., 2001), we will also examine the relation between FAA and temperament and control for infant temperament when examining the effects of FAA.