Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
People identify faces of their own race more accurately than those of other races (other race effect). Several lines of research suggest that our often greater experience identifying faces of our own race leads to a richer perceptual representation for own-race faces compared to other-race faces. However, the source of this effect remains unclear. The present study investigated whether other race effect was obtained with a single facial feature (left eyebrow, right eyebrow, left eye, right eye, nose, or mouth) as well as the whole face. For the whole face stimuli, we replicated the classic other-race effect: identification accuracy was significantly higher for own- (Japanese) compared to other-race (Caucasian) faces. For our single-feature stimuli, we obtained a significant other-race effect for 3 out of the 8 features: Left-eye, right eyebrow, and nose. This result contradicts the holistic processing account of other-race effect.
