Poor recognition of other-race faces cannot always be explained by a lack of effort

ABSTRACT

People are generally better at recognizing own-race than other-race faces. This “other-race effect” is very well established although the underlying causes are much debated. Social-cognitive accounts argue that the other-race effect stems from a lack of motivation to individuate other-race faces, whereas perceptual expertise accounts argue that it reflects the tuning of face-processing mechanisms by experience to own-race faces. We investigated the effort people apply to recognize own-race and other-race faces. Caucasian participants completed the Australian and Chinese Cambridge Face Memory Tasks, once with the standard timing and once with self-paced study phases. If people are less motivated to recognize other-race faces they should apply less effort, that is, when given control over viewing times they should spend less time studying other-race than own-race faces. Contrary to social-cognitive accounts, there was no evidence of reduced effort for other-race faces. Participants did not spend less time studying other-race than own-race faces in the self-paced condition. Moreover, participants reported applying significantly more effort to telling apart other-race than own-race faces. These results are not consistent with reduced motivation to individuate other-race faces. Thus, they appear more consistent with perceptual expertise rather than social-cognitive accounts of the other-race effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Face recognition
• other-race effect

Acknowledgements

We thank Stephen Pond for his assistance in programming the tasks, Elinor McKone for allowing us to use the Australian CFMT, and Jia Lui for allowing us to use the Chinese CFMT.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term race is used, as is conventional in this literature, to refer to visually distinct groups of people.

2 The word “Chinese” was replaced with “Asian” to reflect the likelihood that participants may not be aware of the exact ethnic origin of the people they interact with.

3 Analysis of participants who completed the self-paced block first revealed a similar pattern to that of the full analysis, that is, a tendency toward longer viewing times for other-race than own-race faces (see Supplemental data for analysis). Importantly there was no evidence that other-race viewing times were shorter than own-race viewing times as would be predicted by social-cognitive accounts of the other-race effect.

4 Note the novel phase, which requires recognition of learned identities across changes in viewpoint or lighting, produced a strong other-race effect whereas the other phases did not (see Table S1). As expected, performance in the learning phase was at ceiling for own-race and other-race faces. Comparison of previous studies testing own-race samples revealed that the noise phases of the CFMT-Australian and CFMT-Chinese are not comparable, with the noise condition in the CFMT-Chinese much easier than in the CFMT-Australian (McKone et al., 2011; McKone et al., 2012). The other-race effect for Caucasian participants in this condition may therefore be obscured by the overall differences in difficulty.

5 The one study that failed to find effects of motivation in Caucasian and African American participants demonstrated that the previous positive findings were likely due to problems with the stimuli and failure to properly counterbalance faces across expression conditions rather than increased motivation (Gwinn et al., 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders [grant number CE110001021]; Australian Research Council Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award to Rhodes [grant number DP130102300].