NCT06550245

Babies' Brain Responses to Strangers

The Malleability of Social Group Understanding in Infancy and Early Childhood

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 100 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of California Santa Cruz · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 7 Months – 12 Months
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Researchers at the Diversity in Development Lab at UC Santa Cruz are investigating how babies' brain activities respond to people from familiar and unfamiliar racial backgrounds.

Detailed description

The goal of this observational study is to learn how infants' brain activities, as captured by EEG, differ for familiar or unfamiliar racial group in typically developing infants. The main questions of the study are: * Will infants show greater event-related desynchronization (i.e., more motor system activation), frontal theta synchronization (i.e., more attention), and more positive frontal alpha asymmetry (i.e., more approach motivation) to familiar than unfamiliar racial group? * How does infants' exposure to racial diversity in their social network and neighborhoods relate to these EEG activities? Participants will visit a laboratory at the UC Santa Cruz campus for this study. Infants will put an EEG cap on and watch about 15 minutes of videos, in which people from different racial backgrounds do different actions (e.g., grabbing an object, saying hi and approaching closer, and playing peek-a-boo). Caregivers will be asked to fill out a demographic form and a social network survey.

Conditions

• Infant Development

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Infants observing familiar and unfamiliar racial groups	All infants will see videos of people from familiar and unfamiliar racial backgrounds. Depending on the caregiver's race, infants will be assigned to see people who are from the same racial background as their caregiver (i.e., familiar) and people who are not.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-07-23
• Primary completion: 2025-10-01
• Completion: 2025-10-01
• First posted: 2024-08-13
• Last updated: 2025-03-06

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States