The role of experience during childhood in shaping the other‐race effect

Heering, Adélaïde de; Liedekerke, Claire De; Deboni, Malorie; Rossion, Bruno

doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00876.x

Cited by 124 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, perceptual exposure to other-race faces does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the ORE. Caucasian adults who reported having extensive contact with African (Chiroro & Valentine, 1995) or Asian ( Ng & Lindsay, 1994) individuals nevertheless showed a robust ORE. Similarly, Korean children adopted between 2 and 26 months of age by Caucasian families and raised in a Caucasian environment do not show a reverse ORE for Asian faces (de Heering, de Liedekerke, Deboni & Rossion, 2010). In addition to perceptual experience, motivation to individuate people from the other-race seems to be an important factor for ameliorating the ORE (Levin, 2000), although the source of the ORE is still an open question.…”

Section: Holistic Processes and The Other-race Effectmentioning

confidence: 95%

The “Parts and Wholes” of Face Recognition: A Review of the Literature

Tanaka

Simonyi

2016

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

138

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It has been claimed that faces are recognized as a “whole” rather than the recognition of individual parts. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1993, Martha Farah and I attempted to operationalize the holistic claim using the part/whole task. In this task, participants studied a face and then their memory presented in isolation and in the whole face. Consistent with the holistic view, recognition of the part was superior when tested in the whole-face condition compared to when it was tested in isolation. The “whole face” or holistic advantage was not found for faces that were inverted, or scrambled, nor for non-face objects suggesting that holistic encoding was specific to normal, intact faces. In this paper, we reflect on the part/whole paradigm and how it has contributed to our understanding of what it means to recognize a face as a “whole” stimulus. We describe the value of part/whole task for developing theories of holistic and non-holistic recognition of faces and objects. We discuss the research that has probed the neural substrates of holistic processing in healthy adults and people with prosopagnosia and autism. Finally, we examine how experience shapes holistic face recognition in children and recognition of own- and other-race faces in adults. The goal of this article is to summarize the research on the part/whole task and speculate on how it has informed our understanding of holistic face processing.

show abstract

Section: Holistic Processes and The Other-race Effectmentioning

confidence: 95%

The “Parts and Wholes” of Face Recognition: A Review of the Literature

Tanaka

Simonyi

2016

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

138

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In terms of the neural responses measured in both groups at the N170 component, we found that while large-town observers had robust differences between face and non-face amplitudes (which is typical of N170 response properties), small-town observers exhibited a smaller amplitude difference between faces and chairs, which suggests poorer category selectivity at this particular component. These results suggest that like biased experience favoring own-race faces over other-race faces (de Heering et al 2010), the overall amount of face exposure observers receive during development affects their ability to recognize faces of all categories effectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Hometown size affects the processing of naturalistic face variability

Balas

Saville

2017

Vision Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Face exposure during development determines adults' abilities to recognize faces and the information they use to process them. Individual differences in the face categories represented in the visual environment can lead to category-specific deficits for recognizing faces that are atypical of observer's experience (e.g. the other-race effect). But what happens when observers have limited opportunities to learn about faces in general? In previous work, we found that observers from depopulated areas have poorer face recognition performance than observers from larger communities, suggesting that impoverished face experience limits face processing broadly. Here, we further investigate this phenomenon by examining how hometown size impacts the ability to assess appearance variability in natural images of faces and bodies. We asked individuals from small and large communities to complete (1) an unconstrained card-sorting task designed to test observers' ability to categorize within-person and between-person appearance variability properly, and (2) the Cambridge Face Memory Test. For both tasks, we examined the direct comparison between groups as well as the relationship between CFMT scores and sorting performance as a function of face experience. We find that small-town observers perform more poorly on the CFMT, but exhibit both better and worse performance than large-town observers on different aspects of the card-sorting task. Further, we also examine the relationship between CFMT performance and card-sorting errors. Our results suggest that individual differences in lifetime face exposure induce important variation in face processing abilities.

show abstract

“…Moreover, developmental studies have shown that the ORB is absent in very young children and only emerges during the first year of life [18], unless perceptual training with other-race faces during this critical stage prevents it ([19], for related findings, see [20]). Similarly, the ORB has been found to be absent [21] or even reversed [22] in Asian adults that were adopted and raised by European families, suggesting a strong influence of visual experience on our capacity to deal with faces from our own compared to other ethnicities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

On the Other Side of the Fence: Effects of Social Categorization and Spatial Grouping on Memory and Attention for Own-Race and Other-Race Faces

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The term “own-race bias” refers to the phenomenon that humans are typically better at recognizing faces from their own than a different race. The perceptual expertise account assumes that our face perception system has adapted to the faces we are typically exposed to, equipping it poorly for the processing of other-race faces. Sociocognitive theories assume that other-race faces are initially categorized as out-group, decreasing motivation to individuate them. Supporting sociocognitive accounts, a recent study has reported improved recognition for other-race faces when these were categorized as belonging to the participants' in-group on a second social dimension, i.e., their university affiliation. Faces were studied in groups, containing both own-race and other-race faces, half of each labeled as in-group and out-group, respectively. When study faces were spatially grouped by race, participants showed a clear own-race bias. When faces were grouped by university affiliation, recognition of other-race faces from the social in-group was indistinguishable from own-race face recognition. The present study aimed at extending this singular finding to other races of faces and participants. Forty Asian and 40 European Australian participants studied Asian and European faces for a recognition test. Faces were presented in groups, containing an equal number of own-university and other-university Asian and European faces. Between participants, faces were grouped either according to race or university affiliation. Eye tracking was used to study the distribution of spatial attention to individual faces in the display. The race of the study faces significantly affected participants' memory, with better recognition of own-race than other-race faces. However, memory was unaffected by the university affiliation of the faces and by the criterion for their spatial grouping on the display. Eye tracking revealed strong looking biases towards both own-race and own-university faces. Results are discussed in light of the theoretical accounts of the own-race bias.

show abstract

The role of experience during childhood in shaping the other‐race effect

Cited by 124 publications

References 34 publications

The “Parts and Wholes” of Face Recognition: A Review of the Literature

The “Parts and Wholes” of Face Recognition: A Review of the Literature

Hometown size affects the processing of naturalistic face variability

On the Other Side of the Fence: Effects of Social Categorization and Spatial Grouping on Memory and Attention for Own-Race and Other-Race Faces

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About