Perceptual experience shapes our ability to categorize faces by national origin: A new other‐race effect

Abstract

People are better at recognizing own-race than other-race faces. This other-race effect has been argued to be the result of perceptual expertise, whereby face-specific perceptual mechanisms are tuned through experience. We designed new tasks to determine whether other-race effects extend to categorizing faces by national origin. We began by selecting sets of face stimuli for these tasks that are typical in appearance for each of six nations (three Caucasian, three Asian) according to people from those nations (Study 1). Caucasian and Asian participants then categorized these faces by national origin (Study 2). Own-race faces were categorized more accurately than other-race faces. In contrast, Asian American participants, with more extensive other-race experience than the first Asian group, categorized other-race faces better than own-race faces, demonstrating a reversal of the other-race effect. Therefore, other-race effects extend to the ability to categorize faces by national origin, but only if participants have greater perceptual experience with own-race, than other-race faces. Study 3 ruled out non-perceptual accounts by showing that Caucasian and Asian faces were sorted more accurately by own-race than other-race participants, even in a sorting task without any explicit labelling required. Together, our results demonstrate a new other-race effect in sensitivity to national origin of faces that is linked to perceptual expertise.

It is your fault: workplace consequences of anti-Asian stigma during COVID-19

“…Despite roughly 76% of Asian Americans identifying as non-Chinese (Lopez et al, 2017), China being the most represented Asian country of origin within the US may contribute to non-Asians' false equivalence of Asia with China. In addition to a general tendency toward nondifferentiation based on national origin via the "other-race effect" (Thorup et al, 2018), non-Asians may conflate ethnic, national and racial identities and associate anyone perceived as of Chinese origin with pandemic-related blame (e.g. Cho, 2020).…”

Serial dependence of facial identity for own- and other-race faces

“…It is argued that we gain this expertise for own-race faces through experience, which tunes the perceptual mechanisms underlying face processing to more selectively respond to own-race faces (De Heering et al, 2010;Lee et al, 2011;Rossion & Michel, 2011). Consistent with this, research has found that greater other-race experience is associated with a smaller otherrace effect in face perception (Chiroro & Valentine, 1995;Hancock & Rhodes, 2008;Rhodes et al, 2009;Thorup et al, 2018;Walker & Hewstone, 2006). Further, when motivation is consistent towards own-and other-races, an other-race effect has been observed that is purely due to a lack of perceptual expertise with other-race faces (Wan et al, 2015).…”

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Individuals are significantly better at recognising own-race faces compared with other-race faces, a phenomenon called the other-race effect (for a meta-analysis, see Meissner & Brigham, 2001). The other-race effect is typically assessed via unfamiliar face recognition memory (Meissner & Brigham, 2001); however, other race-effects have also been found in tasks that do not involve memory, such as face discrimination (Walker & Tanaka, 2003), face matching (Megreya et al, 2011), face categorisation (Thorup et al, 2018), and even judgements of eye gaze direction (Collova et al, 2017), highlighting that this effect is common throughout unfamiliar face perception. The other-race effect can also have real-world implications.

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“…Inclusion of the other-race questionnaire allowed us to ask whether other-race contact was associated with serial dependence of facial identity. Previous research has found that greater other-race contact reduces the magnitude of other race-effects in face perception (Chiroro & Valentine, 1995;Hancock & Rhodes, 2008;Rhodes et al, 2009;Thorup et al, 2018;Walker & Hewstone, 2006;Wan et al, 2015). We measured own-and other-race face recognition abilities, using a Caucasian (McKone et al, 2011) and Asian (McKone et al, 2012) version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT; Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006) and a measure of racial contact that was developed by Hancock and Rhodes (2008).…”

Lifetime perceptual experience shapes face memory for own- and other-race faces

“…To best mimic face recognition in daily life, we used the classic Cambridge Face Memory Task (CFMT) in both upright and inverted orientations to assess participants' face recognition. Strengths of the CFMT include: (1) It has been demonstrated to be a reliable method to characterize the nature of face memory (Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006;McKone et al, 2011McKone et al, , 2012McKone, Wan, Robbins, Crookes, & Liu, 2017); (2) It offers a better measure of adults' face recognition than pure picture recognition by incorporating face stimuli that vary in lighting and viewing angles; (3) It consists of three different subtests that vary in difficulty, which provides a sensitive measure of the ORE (McKone et al, 2012;Thorup et al, 2018;Wan et al, 2015;Zhao et al, 2014).…”