The other-race effect in face recognition: Perceptual, social-psychological and development insights

Abstract

The other-race effect (ORE) in face recognition refers to poorer recognition of other- than own-race faces. This thesis addresses two overarching questions: what causes the ORE and what are the consequences of the ORE. Concerning the cause(s) of the ORE, two specific questions are addressed: whether social-motivation or perceptual experience (contact) contributes to the ORE; and whether plasticity of face recognition for face subtypes (specific races) is greater in childhood than in adulthood. My first empirical paper (Chapter 3) investigates the ORE for Caucasian and Asian participants (N=480) in an Australian setting where socio-economic status is similar between these groups. Using both the Cambridge Face Memory Task and an old-new recognition task, motivation-to-individuate instructions did not reduce the ORE for Caucasians and Eastern-raised Asians with low interracial contact. Further, Western-raised Asians with high interracial contact showed no ORE. Results imply the cause of the ORE, in this cultural setting, is lack of interracial contact rather than lack of social-motivation. A new dual-route approach is proposed in which two potential causes of the ORE – lack of social-motivation and lack of experience – can contribute differently across varying cultural settings. Another empirical paper (Chapter 5) asks whether the effects of interracial experience arise due to contact in childhood or adulthood, again testing Caucasian and Asian participants (N=373). Correlations with self-reported contact found larger OREs were significantly associated with lower contact during childhood, but not adulthood. That is, adulthood contact was ineffective for improving other-race face recognition. The same pattern is reported for smaller within-race variations in ethnicity. Findings imply that, similar to language, the developmental course of face recognition contains a “sensitive period” of greater plasticity during childhood. A third empirical paper (Chapter 4) addresses the apparent conflict that, in real life, the ORE can have serious consequences (e.g., cases of wrongful imprisonment based on eyewitness misidentification), yet, laboratory studies show only a modest-sized mean ORE. This chapter, using an individual differences approach, investigates whether there exists a subgroup of individuals who are so poor at recognising other-race faces they are 'face blind' for other-race faces. Results indicated 8.1% of Caucasian and Eastern-raised Asian individuals (N=444) were other-race face blind. Risk factors included: being at low end of the normal range of own-race face recognition ability; and lack of interracial contact (particularly in childhood); but not lack of effort applied to individuating other-race faces. Taken together, my findings have broad theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, results argue the cause of the ORE, at least for Caucasians and Asians in an Australian setting, is lack of perceptual experience in childhood, and not lack of social-motivation to individuate other-race people. Practically, the results argue: overcoming the ORE via real-world contact requires specifically childhood experience; simply increasing motivation is ineffective for improving other-race face recognition; and while some individuals will suffer no real-word functional consequences of the ORE, others, with other-race face blindness, would be expected to suffer severe functional problems in everyday life (e.g., failures to recognise other-race colleagues in the workplace).