How race and age experiences shape young children’s face processing abilities Viola Macchi Cassia a,⇑ , Lizhu Luo b , Antonella Pisacane a , Hong Li c , Kang Lee d a Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano–Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy b School of Psychology, Southwest University, Beibei, Chongqing 400715, China c Department of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, Liaoning 116029, China d Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2X2, Canada article info Article history: Received 12 October 2013 Revised 27 November 2013 Available online 4 January 2014 Keywords: Face perception Inversion effect Children Other-race effect Own-race bias Other-age effect Own-age bias Sibling experience abstract Despite recent advances in research on race and age biases, the question of how race and age experiences combine to affect young children’s face perception remains unexplored. To fill this gap, the current study tested two ethnicities of 3-year-old children using a combined cross-race/cross-age design. Caucasian children with and without older siblings and Mainland Chinese children without older siblings were tested for their ability to discriminate adult and child Caucasian faces as well as adult and child Asian faces in both upright and inverted orientations. Children of both ethnicities manifested an own-race bias, which was confined to adult faces, and an adult face bias, which was confined to own-race faces. Like- wise, sibling experience affected Caucasian children’s processing of own-race child faces, but this effect did not generalize to other- race faces. Results suggest that race and age information are repre- sented at the same hierarchical level in young children’s memory. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction It is well established that, in adults, discrimination and recognition can be superior for some cat- egories of faces compared with others, giving rise to a number of face processing biases. In fact, human adults are better at processing human faces than non-human animal faces (i.e., own-species bias; see review in Dufour, Pascalis, & Petit, 2006), same-race faces than other-race faces (i.e., own-race bias; see review by Meissner & Brigham, 2001), and adult faces than other-age faces (i.e., own-age bias; 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2013.11.016 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: viola.macchicassia@unimib.it (V. Macchi Cassia). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 120 (2014) 87–101 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp