Attending to identity cues reduces the own-age but not the own-race recognition advantage

Proietti, Valentina; Laurence, Sarah; Matthews, Claire M.; Zhou, Xiaomei; Mondloch, Catherine J.

Abstract

Adults’ ability to recognize individual faces is shaped by experience. Young adults recognize own-age and own-race faces more accurately than other-age and other-race faces. The own-age and own-race biases have been attributed to differential perceptual experience and to differences in how in-group vs. out-group faces are processed, with in-group faces being processed at the individual level and out-group faces being processed at the categorical level. To examine this social categorization hypothesis, young adults studied young and older faces in Experiment 1 and own- and other-race faces in Experiment 2. During the learning phase the identity-matching group viewed faces in pairs and completed a same/different task designed to enhance attention to individuating cues; the passive-viewing group memorized faces presented individually. After the learning phase, all participants completed an identical old/new recognition task. Both passive-viewing groups showed the expected recognition bias, but divergent patterns were observed in the identity-matching groups. Whereas the identity-matching task eliminated the own-age bias, it neither eliminated nor reduced the own-race bias. Collectively, these results suggest that categorization-individuation processes do not play the same role in explaining the two recognition biases.

Citation

Proietti, V., Laurence, S., Matthews, C. M., Zhou, X., & Mondloch, C. J. (2019). Attending to identity cues reduces the own-age but not the own-race recognition advantage. Vision Research, 157, 184-191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2017.11.010

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 15, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Mar 9, 2018
• Publication Date: 2019-04
• Publicly Available Date: May 26, 2023
• Journal: Vision Research
• Print ISSN: 0042-6989
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 157
• Pages: 184-191
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2017.11.010
• Keywords: face recognition; categorization-individuation processes; own-age bias; own-race bias
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/409749
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2017.11.010