Holistic processing is finely tuned for faces of one's own race
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Updated: Aug 6, 2026

Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm
Published on: December 24, 2015
Caroline Michel1, Bruno Rossion, Jaehyun Han
1Unité Cognition et Développement and Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Abstract:
Recognizing individual faces outside one's race poses difficulty, a phenomenon known as the other-race effect. Most researchers agree that this effect results from differential experience with same-race (SR) and other-race (OR) faces. However, the specific processes that develop with visual experience and underlie the other-race effect remain to be clarified. We tested whether the integration of facial features into a whole representation-holistic processing-was larger for SR than OR faces in Caucasians and Asians without life experience with OR faces. For both classes of participants, recognition of the upper half of a composite-face stimulus was more disrupted by the bottom half (the composite-face effect) for SR than OR faces, demonstrating that SR faces are processed more holistically than OR faces. This differential holistic processing for faces of different races, probably a by-product of visual experience, may be a critical factor in the other-race effect.
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