Two Factors in Face Recognition: Whether You Know the Person’s Face and Whether You Share the Person’s Race

Xingchen Zhou, A. M. Burton, Rob Jenkins*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)524-539
Number of pages16
JournalPerception
Volume50
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 May 2021
Externally publishedYes

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Two Factors in Face Recognition: Whether You Know the Person’s Face and Whether You Share the Person’s Race'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this