What is difficult about other-race face recognition?

Prof. William G. HAYWARD
Ph.D., Yale University
Department of Psychology,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

Although faces are normally something that we recognize without difficulty, faces belonging to people of unfamiliar races seem somehow different; with these, recognition is much more challenging. Over the last few years I have been investigating the cause of this own-race advantage. This research has been conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and in all studies reported here we collected data in both Hong Kong and Perth to get a double dissociation between race of face and expertise. I will report the results of three experiments which look at the nature of encoding of own-race and other-race faces, and also whether the own-race advantage is driven more strongly by some forms of facial information (holistic and/or configural) than others (components). We find evidence that the own-race advantage is due to a superiority in encoding of a range of facial information, including components. Implications for theories of face recognition will be discussed.