Babies as young as 11 months can pick up cultural differences in our expressions

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-10-01 10:00

Australia; NSW

Babies as young as 11 months can pick up cultural differences in our expressions, according to Australian research. The study found that Caucasian Australian infants spent longer looking at videos of angry and surprised Japanese mothers than they did Caucasian Australian mothers. However when the study was repeated with two groups of Australian mothers who varied by race but not culture, there was no difference in how long babies looked at the mothers.

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conference: PLOS ONE

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Organisation/s: Western Sydney University

Funder: This project was funded by an Early Career Researcher Grant and Vice Chancellor’s Professional Development Scholarship provided by Western Sydney University, as well as Research Fund and Start-up Grant provided by School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University. During the manuscript writing, the first author has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 798658 hosted by Center for Multilingualism across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo, financed by Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme grant agreement No. 223265. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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