An Encoding Advantage for Own-Race versus Other-Race Faces

Abstract

Studies have shown that individuals are better able to recognise the faces of people from their own race than the faces of people from other races. Although the so-called own-race effect has been generally regarded as an advantage in recognition memory, differences in the processing of the own-race versus other-race faces might also be found at the earlier stages of perceptual encoding. In this study, the perceptual basis of the own-race effect was investigated by generating a continuum of images by morphing an East Asian parent face with a Caucasian parent face. In a same/different discrimination task, East Asian and Caucasian participants judged whether the morph faces were physically identical to, or different from, their parent faces. The results revealed a significant race-of-participant by race-of-face interaction such that East Asian participants were better able to discriminate East Asian faces, whereas Caucasian participants were better able to discriminate Caucasian faces. These results indicate that an own-race advantage occurs at the encoding stage of face processing.

Multiple cues in social perception: The time course of processing race and facial expression

“…These effects are consistent with past researcher's suggestions that the N200 reflects individuation and deeper processing when viewing faces, which we would expect to be greater for faces of Whites (because they are members of a culturally powerful group and/or the ingroup) and faces displaying happy, approachable expressions Ito & Urland, 2003;James et al, 2001;Tanaka et al, 2004;Walker & Tanaka, 2003).…”

“…The sagittal main effect (F(2,56)=36.43, p<.01) showed that the N100 was maximal at Cz (M=−6.20 μV) as compared with the average of Fz (−4.92 μV) and Pz (M=−3.30 μV, F(1,28)=94.60, p<.01). The Race × Sagittal interaction (F (2,56)=4.91, p<.05) showed that N100 amplitudes were larger to Blacks than Whites at Cz (M Black =−6.40 μV and M White =−6.00 μV , F(1,28) 2003; James et al, 2001;Tanaka et al, 2004;Walker & Tanaka, 2003). Like the P200, there was no evidence of an interaction between race and emotion in the N200.…”

“…In the case of expression and race, although automatic vigilance mechanisms make it adaptive to initially devote greater attentional resources to angry faces and faces of racial outgroup members (as reflected in the N100 and P200), individuals with positive or neutral expressions, and those who are racial ingroup members are probably more desirable for greater individuation. Consequently, this component is typically larger to neutral than fearful faces (Eimer & Holmes, 2002;Holmes, Vuilleumeir, & Eimer, 2003) and to faces of one's own race than other races (Ito, Thompson, & Cacioppo, 2004;Ito & Urland, 2003;James, Johnstone, & Hayward, 2001;Tanaka, Kiefer, & Bukach, 2004;Walker & Tanaka, 2003). For the N200, individuation and deeper processing predict larger N200s to faces displaying happy, approachable expressions and to Whites (cf., Holmes et al, 2003;Ito & Urland, 2003;James et al, 2001;Tanaka et al, 2004;Walker & Tanaka, 2003).…”

The unfamiliar face effect on forensic craniofacial reconstruction and recognition

“…It is possible that unconsciously they could sculpt the face from a limited memory database especially when partially trained; Secondly, the facial recognition ability of the assessors utilised for accuracy assessment may be affected by unfamiliarity with the ancestry of the reconstructed face. Even though psychological research into the CRE has primarily been in memory recall rather than comparison without memory load, the CRE has also been observed in performances with minimal required memory [79] and in the early stage of perceptual encoding face process [68,80]. These studies suggest that there is a possibility that the CRE may affect the accuracy of recognising or identifying CFRs by assessors from another ancestry to the reconstructed face.…”

InterFace: A software package for face image warping, averaging, and principal components analysis

“…Other image-manipulation techniques allow us to alter images in ways which we predict will affect judgements of gender, age, race or any number of other psychologically relevant dimensions (e.g. Busey, 1998;Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008;Stewart et al, 2012;Walker & Tanaka, 2003). In short, the facility to manipulate images in wellspecified ways opens up the opportunity to design perceptual experiments which were impossible in the era before widely-available graphical computers.…”