Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To recognize and act on baby-schema features – such as large eyes and a rounded face - is commonly seen as an automatic, innate capability in humans. Following this logic, adults' perception of baby-schema features should be independent of cultural background. Contrasting this, evidence shows that perception of adult faces is tuned by culture-specific visual experience. In this preregistered study, we investigate whether sensitivity to baby-schema is dependent on visual experience in two diverse populations (urban German; small-scale Batek, Malaysia). We morphed child faces sourced from the target communities to different degrees of baby-schema and asked participants to detect the odd-one-out of three faces in both in- and out-group trials across seven difficulty (difference in baby-schema-degree) levels. While difficulty strongly effected accuracy in both communities, we found little evidence that baby-schema sensitivity was modulated by experience, suggesting robustness in perceptual processing and possibly generalized high relevance of this class of stimuli.