Same faces, different labels: generating the cross-race effect in face memory with social category information.

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Racial Perception

Background:

• The cross-race effect (CRE) describes the tendency to recognize own-race faces better than other-race faces.
• The influence of social information on CRE, particularly for racially ambiguous faces, remains an area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of top-down social information in the encoding and recognition of racially ambiguous faces.
• To determine whether social labeling at encoding or testing impacts cross-race face recognition.

Main Methods:

• Hispanic and African American participants studied computer-generated, racially ambiguous faces (50% Hispanic, 50% African American).
• Experiment 1: Faces were presented with group labels (Hispanic or African American) during the study phase.
• Experiment 2: Faces were studied without labels, but labels were provided during the recognition test phase.

Main Results:

• Both Hispanic and African American participants showed superior memory for faces labeled with their own race during the study phase (Experiment 1).
• Labeling faces during the test phase did not influence recognition performance (Experiment 2).
• The cross-race effect was demonstrated to be influenced by top-down social information at the encoding stage.

Conclusions:

• Top-down social information, specifically racial labeling during encoding, can create or enhance the cross-race effect.
• The bias in recognizing racially ambiguous faces appears to occur during the initial encoding of the information, not during retrieval or recognition.