Open AccessTwo Factors in Face Recognition: Whether You Know the Person’s Face and Whether You Share the Person’s Race
Author(s) -
Xingchen Zhou,
A. Mike Burton,
Rob Jenkins
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
perception
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1468-4233
pISSN - 0301-0066
DOI - 10.1177/03010066211014016
Subject(s) - race (biology) , psychology , face (sociological concept) , context (archaeology) , social psychology , cognitive psychology , gender studies , sociology , history , archaeology , social science
One of the best-known phenomena in face recognition is the other-race effect, the observation that own-race faces are better remembered than other-race faces. However, previous studies have not put the magnitude of other-race effect in the context of other influences on face recognition. Here, we compared the effects of (a) a race manipulation (own-race/other-race face) and (b) a familiarity manipulation (familiar/unfamiliar face) in a 2 × 2 factorial design. We found that the familiarity effect was several times larger than the race effect in all performance measures. However, participants expected race to have a larger effect on others than it actually did. Face recognition accuracy depends much more on whether you know the person's face than whether you share the same race.