Perceptual Calibration in Intersectional Race and Gender Categorization Across Development

Black women are often argued to occupy a non-prototypical position within both their racial and gender categories, leading to slower and less accurate categorization—a pattern interpreted as intersectional invisibility, rooted in conceptual beliefs. We propose an alternative perceptual-calibration account in which early intersectional difficulty arises because children’s perceptual gender prototypes are tuned to the statistical properties of faces they most frequently encountered rather than entrenched stereotypes. U.S. children (N = 101, ages 5-10) and adults (N = 47) completed a speeded gender-categorization task with matched Black and White faces controlled for masculinity, femininity, and dominance; a separate adult sample (N = 54) completed the same task using unmatched faces. Children were reliably slower to categorize Black than White women despite high discriminability and minimal response bias, with this asymmetry emerging around age 7.3. Adults showed no intersectional difficulty with matched stimuli but renewed slowdown with unmatched stimuli. This developmental dissociation suggests that intersectional difficulty in perceptual categorization reflects experience-dependent prototype tuning rather than stable conceptual bias.