Other-race faces are generally recognised more poorly than own-race faces. According to Levin's influential race-coding hypothesis, this other-race recognition deficit results from spontaneous coding of race-specifying information, at the expense of individuating information, in other-race faces. Therefore, requiring participants to code race-specifying information for all faces should eliminate the other-race effect by reducing recognition of own-race faces to the level of other-race faces. We tested this prediction in two experiments. Race coding was induced by requiring participants to rate study faces on race typicality (experiment 1) or to categorise them by race (experiment 2). Neither manipulation reduced the other-race effect, providing no support for the race-coding hypothesis. Instead, race-coding instructions marginally increased the other-race effect in experiment 1 and had no effect in experiment 2. These results do not support the race-coding hypothesis. Surprisingly, a control task of rating the attractiveness of study faces increased the other-race effect, indicating that deeper encoding of faces does not necessarily reduce the effect (experiment 1). Finally, the normally robust other-race effect was absent when participants were instructed to individuate other-race faces (experiment 2). We suggest that poorer recognition of other-race faces may reflect reduced perceptual expertise with such faces and perhaps reduced motivation to individuate them.

Facial appearances can powerfully influence adults' trust behaviour, despite limited evidence that these cues constitute honest signals of trustworthiness. It is not clear, however, whether the same is also true for children. The current study investigated whether, like adults, 5‐year‐olds and 10‐year‐olds are more likely to place their trust in partners that look trustworthy than those that look untrustworthy. A second, closely related question was whether children also explicitly value the information from face cues when making trust decisions. We investigated these questions using Token Quest: an economic trust game that gave participants the opportunity to make investments with a series of partners who might (or might not) repay their trust with large returns. These interactions occurred under different conditions, including one in which participants were shown the face of each partner and another in which they could ‘purchase’ access to faces with a portion of their investment capital. Results indicated that, like adults, 10‐year‐old children selectively placed their trust in those partners they perceived as looking trustworthy and many were willing to ‘pay’ to purchase access to these face cues during the trust game. We observed a similar profile of trust behaviour in 5‐year‐olds, with no significant group difference in the impact of face cues on behaviour across the three age groups. Together, these findings indicate that the influence of face cues on trust behaviour emerges early, and highlight a capacity for sophisticated social cognition in young children.

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Other-race faces are generally recognized more poorly than own-race faces. There has been a long-standing interest in the extent to which differences in contact contribute to this other-race effect (ORE). Here, we examined the effect of contact on two distinct aspects of face memory, memory for configuration and for components, both of which are better for own-race than other-race faces. Configural and component memory were measured using recognition memory tests with intact study faces and blurred (isolates memory for configuration) and scrambled (isolates memory for components) test faces, respectively. Our participants were a large group of ethnically Chinese individuals who had resided in Australia for varying lengths of time, from a few weeks to 26 years. We found that time in a Western country significantly (negatively) predicted the size of the ORE for configural, but not component, memory. There was also a trend for earlier age of arrival to predict smaller OREs in configural, but not component, memory. These results suggest that memory for configural information in other-race faces improves with experience with such faces. However, as found for recognition memory generally, the contact effects were small, indicating that other factors must play a substantial role in cross-race differences in face memory.

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Perceptual adaptation not only produces striking perceptual aftereffects, but also enhances coding efficiency and discrimination by calibrating coding mechanisms to prevailing inputs. Attention to simple stimuli increases adaptation, potentially enhancing its functional benefits. Here we show that attention also increases adaptation to faces. In Experiment 1, face identity aftereffects increased when attention to adapting faces was increased using a change detection task. In Experiment 2, figural (distortion) face aftereffects increased when attention was increased using a snap game (detecting immediate repeats) during adaptation. Both were large effects. Contributions of low-level adaptation were reduced using free viewing (both experiments) and a size change between adapt and test faces (Experiment 2). We suggest that attention may enhance adaptation throughout the entire cortical visual pathway, with functional benefits well beyond the immediate advantages of selective processing of potentially important stimuli. These results highlight the potential to facilitate adaptive updating of face-coding mechanisms by strategic deployment of attentional resources

Face identity aftereffects are significantly diminished in children with autism relative to typical children, which may reflect reduced perceptual updating with experience. Here, we investigated whether this atypicality also extends to non-face stimulus categories, which might signal a pervasive visual processing difference in individuals with autism. We used a figural aftereffect task to measure directly perceptual updating following exposure to distorted upright faces, inverted faces and cars, in typical children and children with autism. A size-change between study and test stimuli limited the likelihood that any processing atypicalities reflected group differences in adaptation to low-level features of the stimuli. Results indicated that, relative to typical children, figural aftereffects for upright faces, but not inverted faces or cars, were significantly attenuated in children with autism. Moreover, the group difference was amplified when we isolated the 'face-selective' component of the aftereffect, by partialling out the mid-level shape adaptation common to upright and inverted face stimuli. Notably, the aftereffects of typical children were disproportionately larger for upright faces than for inverted faces and cars, but the magnitude of aftereffects of autistic children was not similarly modulated according to stimulus category. These findings are inconsistent with a pervasive adaptive coding atypicality relative to typical children, and suggest that reduced perceptual updating may constitute a high-level, and possibly face-selective, visual processing difference in children with autism.

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