Impact of early social environment on neural, cognitive, and social behavior

Hyesung Grace Hwang, Postdoctoral Researcher

Marc Colomer-Canyelles, Postdoctoral Researcher

We are interested in investigating how social biases emerge in development using a combination of behavioral, neuroscientific, and demographic measures from infancy to early childhood. We are exploring whether infants and children start to show a bias against people who differ from them in racial background or speak a different language from them in a range of social behaviors and in neural measures using electroencephalogram (EEG). We are also interested in how their exposure to racial and linguistic diversity from their social networks and neighborhoods could influence these processes. This project is supported by funding from NSF.

This project investigates the emergence of the tendency to favor those who are similar to us (i.e., ingroup) over dissimilar others (i.e., outgroup), with the hope that a developmental approach can provide insights into how to mitigate the negative consequences of these tendencies. Converging findings indicate that sensitivity to social categories such as race and language emerges early in life and shapes infants’ social responses. However, the mechanisms behind this ingroup bias and the factors that contribute to its emergence are poorly understood. The current project proposes to investigate a prime candidate in shaping ingroup bias early in life: The racial and linguistic diversity in infants’ proximal (e.g., family, friends) and distal (e.g., people infants see on the street or on the park) social environment.

Several studies will investigate how 9-month-old infants respond to people from different linguistic and racial backgrounds using both behavioral and neural measures. Particularly, we will study how infants imitate, attend to, and interact with strangers form distinct social groups, and how their brain activates in response to others. To address this, we will use EEG, a safe, non-invasive technique that allows us to passively record brain activity while infants watch videos or interact with others. To address the main research questions, we will also assess the diversity of infants’ social environment via census information (neighborhood) and a detailed parental survey about infants’ social network. We will ask questions such as: how malleable is early social bias depending on social experience? What cognitive and affective processes are modulated by the tendency to prefer same-language speakers and same-race individuals?

Another major goal of this project is to rectify the severe lack of research on minority populations in developmental cognition. The proposed studies will aim at recruiting equal sample sizes of racial, ethnic, and linguistic minority infants and majority infants to better understand how minority status influences infants’ ingroup bias development compared to majority status.

This project is funded for 5 years (2021-2026) by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Relevant publications:

Hwang, H. G., Debnath, R., Meyer, M., Salo, V. C., Fox, N. A., & Woodward, A. L. (2021). Neighborhood racial demographics predict infants’ neural responses to people of different races. Developmental science, 24(4), e13070.

Hwang, H.G. & Markson, L (2018). Locals don’t have accents: Children weigh phonological proficiency over syntactic or semantic proficiency when categorizing individuals. Journal of Child Language.Advanced online publication. doi: 10.1017/S0305000917000587

DeJesus, J., Hwang, H. G., Dautel, J. B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). ‘American = English-speaker’ before ‘American = White.’ The development of children’s reasoning about nationality. Child Development.Advanced online publication. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12845

DeJesus, J., Hwang, H. G., Dautel, J. B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). Bilingual children prefer familiar native accents to familiar nonnative accents. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Advanced online publication. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.07.005