{"pk":50304,"title":"Cultural Variability in Baby-Schema Perception: Insights on Face Perception from Two Small-Scale Malaysian and An Urban German Community","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Baby-schema is a social perception phenomenon describing how infantile facial features and their abstract representation in animals and objects automatically engage human caregiving responses. While often considered universal, its cross-cultural variability remains untested outside large-scale industrialized communities. Does cultural background and visual experience influence perceptual and behavioral biases of baby-schema?\n\nWe examined responses to manipulated infant faces in two Indigenous Malaysian (Batek, Temiar) and an urban German community. In a pre-registered eye-tracking task, participants viewed human and cat face pairs differing only in baby-schema-level (high vs. low) and completed a pre-registered binary forced-choice task. Germans selected high baby-schema faces as more likable, cuter, younger, and healthier, while small-scale communities showed attenuated or absent effects and were less sensitive to baby-schema manipulations in a control discrimination-task. Eye-tracking showed cultural differences in gaze patterns that were not meaningfully influenced by species or baby-schema-level. A follow-up study will investigate effects of group membership.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Face Processing; Social cognition; Cross-cultural analysis; Eye tracking; Field studies"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t0520p6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Marie","middle_name":"M. G.","last_name":"Michael","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology","department":""},{"first_name":"Daniel","middle_name":"Benjamin Moritz","last_name":"Haun","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50304/galley/38266/download/"}]}