Structural aspects of face recognition and the other-race effect

Journal of Applied Psychology, 1991

The other-race effect (or own-race bias or cross-racial identification effect) refers to the finding that recognition memory tends to be better for faces of members of subjects' own race than for faces of members of other races. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that perceptual skills specific to identifying faces of particular racial groups contribute to this effect. On each of 50 trials, a photograph of a face was tachistoscopically presented for 120 ms, followed by a pattern mask and then a plain-view test pair composed of the previously presented face and a matched foil. As predicted, an other-race effect was obtained on this perceptual task: White subjects performed significantly more poorly on trials involving African American faces than on trials involving White faces, whereas no such difference was obtained among African American subjects.

Perception, 1996

It is well-known that people recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races-a phenomenon often referred to as the 'other-race effect'. Using brief presentations of faces, we show a similar effect for the task of discriminating the sex of a face. Specifically, Caucasian observers discriminated male and female Caucasian faces more accurately/efficiently than did Oriental observers, and Oriental observers discriminated male and female Japanese faces more accurately/efficiently than did Caucasian observers. This result indicates that, under suboptimal viewing conditions, the identification of even the most salient of facial characteristics-face sex-is impaired for other-race faces. This finding suggests, also, that the nature and diversity of our experience with faces may affect not only the quality of the face representation for later access by recognition processes, but also the efficiency of a perceptual discrimination process. Intriguingly, too, ...

Frontiers in Psychology, 2017

It was found that face classification by race is more quickly for other-race than own-race faces (other-race classification advantage, ORCA). Controlling the spatial frequencies of face images, the current study investigated the perceptual processing differences based on spatial frequencies between own-race and other-race faces that might account for the ORCA. Regardless of the races of the observers, the own-race faces were classified faster and more accurately for broad-band faces than for both lower and higher spatial frequency (SF) faces, whereas, although other-race faces were classified less accurately for higher SF than for either broad-band or lower SF faces, there was no difference between broad-band and lower SF conditions of other-race faces. Although it was not evident for higher SF condition, the ORCA was more evident for lower SF than that for broad-band faces. The present data indicate that global/configural information is needed for subordinate race categorization of faces and that an important source of ORCA is application of global/configural computations by default while categorizing an own-race face but not while categorizing an other-race face.

Nature Neuroscience, 2001

People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of other races 1-3. The same-race advantage has been demonstrated with behavioral studies involving a wide variety of protocols, face stimuli, participants and cultural settings. Despite its robustness, this finding has defied a simple explanation. One theory, the contact hypothesis, proposes that the same-race advantage results from greater experience with faces from one's own race 1,2,4,5. This is consistent with the finding that in the United States the race effect is stronger for European Americans, who may have limited experience with African-American faces, than for African Americans, who, by virtue of being a minority, generally have greater experience with European-American faces. There are several lines of evidence that expertise in face processing is a skill that develops over many years of practice 6. This specialization is thought to be a neurobiological solution to the perceptual challenge of identifying individual faces from among many similar faces that share common features (eyes, nose, mouth) and that differ on the basis of relatively subtle configural relationships among those features. Because such expertise is built upon practice in particular experiences, it is closely tied to those experiences. Support for this type of experiential specificity comes from studies demonstrating that inversion of faces disrupts recognition disproportionately compared to other stimuli 7,8. Presumably, this reflects the lack of experience in identifying inverted faces. By extension, most people's limited experience with faces from other races may influence how they process such faces. For example, recognition of other-race faces is less affected by inversion than same-race faces 5,9. An alternate explanation posits that superior memory for same-race faces emerges because of differential saliency of same-race and other-race faces 10. Sorting out the relative contributions of experience and saliency has proven difficult because differences in exposure to other-race faces may be confounded by differences in perceived saliency, attitude or attention. Understanding the basis of memory differences for same-race and other-race faces has important practical implica

1997

The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending \face space" models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories de ned by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classi ability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classi ability of faces were independent|a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classi ability depend on a face's "distance" from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity / masculinity ratings) related to the gender classi ability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female faces { a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally, we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classi ability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures. This combined analysis indicated that face recognizability is related to the distinctiveness of a face with respect to its gender subcategory prototype. Additionally, the gender classi ability of faces related to at least one caricatured aspect of face gender.