Perceptual and social processes interact to cause the other-race effect

Abstract

Is the other-race effect is caused by perceptual expertise (greater experience with own race faces endows us with more efficient processing of the visual features that discriminate them from each other) or social categorization (people normally encode individuating features for own-race faces, but only category-defining features for faces from other races)? In this talk I will discuss a range of studies that demonstrate that both contribute to the effect. First, I will present data that show better recognition of own-race faces when they are presented as coming from one's own social group than another social group. Second, I will show that even if all faces need to be individuated, however, own-race faces are still learned more efficiently than other-race faces. Third, we will examine changes in holistic processing of faces caused by social categorization. These results suggest that a combination of perceptual and social processes combine to cause the other-race effect.