Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: A meta-analytic review.

Abstract

The current article reviews the own-race bias (ORB) phenomenon in memory for human faces, the finding that own-race faces are better remembered when compared with memory for faces of another, less familiar race. Data were analyzed from 39 research articles, involving 91 independent samples and nearly 5,000 participants. Measures of hit and false alarm rates, and aggregate measures of discrimination accuracy and response criterion were examined, including an analysis of 8 study moderators. Several theoretical relationships were also assessed (i.e., the influence of racial attitudes and interracial contact). Overall, results indicated a "mirror effect" pattern in which own-race faces yielded a higher proportion of hits and a lower proportion of false alarms compared with other-race faces. Consistent with this effect, a significant ORB was also found in aggregate measures of discrimination accuracy and response criterion. The influence of perceptual learning and differentiation processes in the ORB are discussed, in addition to the practical implications of this phenomenon.

Dog owners show experience-based viewing behaviour in judging dog face approachability

“…This highly efficient cognitive processing for faces seems to be correlated with our prior experience of face encountering, as clearly demonstrated by psychological studies such as own-race bias (e.g., O'Toole, Deffenbacher, Valentin, & Abdi, 1994). That is, in comparison with faces of people from our own race, processing less experienced faces from other races often results in frequent misidentification, poorer performance in recognition, memory and perceptual discrimination, and less accurate judgement of age and gender (Dehon & Brédart, 2001;Levin, 2000;Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Interestingly, our prior experience with a face could also affect early stage of face recognition process, such as gaze allocation in extracting diagnostic facial cues from local facial regions (i.e.…”

The unfamiliar face effect on forensic craniofacial reconstruction and recognition

“…Even though the hit rates from this study were not directly comparable to the results from earlier research, we cautiously suggest that all assessor groups were presumed to employ universally categorised processing for the matching performance between the CFR and possible faces in the photo array. This presumption does not appears to be consistent with the results of previous studies which established that different ancestry people, especially between White European and East Asian, demonstrated a different processing strategy when recognising the human face -White Europeans recognise familiar-race faces more holistically than Asian faces, whereas East Asians demonstrate holistic strategies for processing both familiar-and unfamiliar-race facial configuration [65,74,77]. It therefore hypothesised that the assessors may alter the perceptual strategy (holistic processing) when configuring CFRs, even from the familiar-race skulls, because the process of recognising CFR requires more analytic approaches than recognising human faces.…”

“…Since the early 20 th century, cognitive psychologists have recognised a phenomenon where people show a tendency to recognise and memorise more accurately the faces of their own ancestry group than the faces from a different ancestry. This fascinating subject has been empirically established as a robust theory named 'cross-race effect (CRE)' (also referred to as the 'own-race effect/bias' or 'other-race effect') by the research related to eyewitness identification and facial recognition over the last four decades (for reviews, see [63][64][65]). In early years, the CRE had been empirically studied employing the faces from Black and White subjects.…”

“…This has been established by the studies showing the primary factors influencing the phenomenon: contact and attitudes with other-racial groups, encoding and representational processes, perceptual-memory expertise, and perceptual categorisation (for reviews, see [69,70]). According to the research into the theoretical underpinnings of the CRE, the differences in experience with the same (familiar)-and other (unfamiliar)-race faces (also known as the 'contact hypothesis') are considered the main contribution to the CRE [65,[71][72][73][74].…”

Studying the influence of race on the gaze cueing effect using eye tracking method

“…Было показано, что при опознании лиц своей расы/этноса ве-роятность правильных ответов значимо повышается, а вероятность ложных тре-вог и время реакции значимо снижают-ся (Malpass, Kravitz, 1969). Данный фено-мен был неоднократно подтвержден вне зависимости от расовой принадлежно-сти самих участников и предъявляемых изображений лиц, методов и особенно-стей процедуры исследования (Meissner, Brigham, 2001;Барабанщиков, Ананьева, 2009;Харитонов, Ананьева, 2012).…”