Children automatically encode race and gender simultaneously

One of the fundamental tasks children must master is learning what categories people use to guide social interactions. Previous work suggests that children automatically encode gender by the preschool years and race by early childhood. However, whether children automatically encode race and gender simultaneously is unknown. The present work (N=123, Mage=6.66, SD=2.03; 66 girls, 57 boys) tests this possibility using a who-saw-what task (Weisman et al., 2015). Results indicate that children were encoding race and gender simultaneously, rather than as separate categories. Additionally, children were most likely to misremember Black girls as either Black men or White men, suggesting that the psychological invisibility of Black women begins to be encoded in memory processes in early childhood. Implications for the developmental trajectory of social category learning are discussed.