Nine-month-old Benjamin Gardner watches images on a screen during an experiment to test where his eyes focus on objects and faces. Researchers at UNLV are studying how infants begin developing stereotypes. Photos by John Gurzinski.
UNLV graduate student and lab manager Andy Cummings displays recordings of 9-month-old Benjamin Gardner as he views images on a screen in a separate room.
If your baby doesn't like you, don't blame it on your spouse's bad genes.
Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas are looking into busting the myth that people are born with stereotypes and gender biases.
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UNLV assistant professor Jennifer Rennels has been researching the subject for years and believes that infants are more comfortable with female faces than male faces, but only because of infant experiences.
The research could pave the road to understanding how and why humans develop stereotypes of the sexes.
"We say, 'Don't judge a book by its cover,' but we do," Rennels said.
From an early age, almost from birth, infants begin processing sights and shapes into comfortable categories, or prototypes.
That includes developing prototypes of human faces based on their experiences with different people.
Most infants spend at least 70 percent of their time with females in their first year, so it's natural that they become more comfortable with female faces, Rennels said.
But in their limited interaction with men, on average, infants tend to have an immediate interest in the faces of more feminine-looking men, Rennels has concluded.
That's not always the case, however, and the basis for Rennels' other theory that stereotypes are not biological.
Trends in her studies have shown that children raised by men tend to look at male faces, and children exposed to people from different ethnic groups tend to look longer at faces from different ethnic groups.
But those experiences are influential in developing stereotypes, Rennels said.
"If they're comfortable with those prototypes, then they're probably going to start linking positive attributes to those prototypes," she said.
To test the theories, Rennels and a team of UNLV graduate students bring infants who have been volunteered by their parents into the lab and test those infants' recognition of faces.
About 500 youngsters have taken part in the studies in the Baby and Child Rebel Lab, in a humble-looking trailer on the southeast corner of campus.
The children are shown a series of sets of two faces -- a male face and a female face, for example -- and a camera then records how long infants hold their gaze with each set of faces.
As any parent knows, infants aren't able to concentrate for long periods of time on static objects or images, so three graduate students review the video of the infants and come up with an agreed-upon length of time for the child's gaze on an image.
The studies include children as young as 3 months old up to 12 months old.
As the children progress to 12 months, Rennels said, she has observed them become more comfortable looking at the face they might not have been exposed to, possibly because it's more interesting to them.
Rennels also is studying how children look at faces. In another room, a camera is able to track an infant's eye movement as the child views images on a screen.
That study is ongoing.
"This is a career's worth of work," said Rennels, who wants to study the trends in older children.
And she believes that career of work could lead to a better understanding of how people understand others.
