Individuating and categorizing faces: the other-race effect is reduced by attending to racial but not identity cues

Daniel Guilbert*, Sachiko Kinoshita, Kim M. Curby

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

According to social-cognitive accounts, the other-race effect in face recognition is driven by our tendency to attend to identity cues when encoding own-race faces (“individuation”) and racial cues when encoding other-race faces (“categorization”). This study employed novel one-back tasks to ensure that participants processed identity (individuation) or racial cues (categorization) when learning faces in an old/new recognition task. Categorization encoding eliminated the other-race effect in recognition sensitivity when list length was short (Experiment 2) but not when list length was long (Experiment 1B). Importantly, this elimination was driven by weaker performance for own-race faces, rather than stronger performance for other-race faces. Individuation encoding failed to reduce the other-race effect, regardless of list length (Experiment 1A and Experiment 2). We compare these findings with previous studies and propose several methodological features (e.g., presentation duration, task difficulty) that might influence the observed impacts of individuation and categorization encoding on the other-race effect.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)300-316
Number of pages17
JournalVisual Cognition
Volume32
Issue number4
Early online date6 Nov 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Keywords

  • categorization
  • face recognition
  • individuation
  • other-race effect

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