Automatic Encoding of Gender by Three-Year-Old Children

The present research tested whether three-year-old children – like older children and adults – automatically encode other people’s gender. Three-year-old participants (N = 24) learned facts about unfamiliar target children who varied in gender and were asked to remember facts about the targets during a test phase. At test, children made more within-category memory errors (e.g., misattributing a fact associated with one girl to another girl) than between-category errors (e.g., misattributing a fact associated with a girl to a boy). The findings suggest that at least as early as three years of age, children automatically encode whether someone is a boy or a girl upon first meeting them. The results have implications for our understanding of the automaticity and emergence of stereotyping processes.