Investigating the other-race effect in working memory

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• The other-race effect (ORE) describes difficulties in recognizing faces of other races, primarily studied in long-term memory (LTM).
• Existing theories propose that the ORE in LTM stems from earlier perceptual and encoding differences between ingroup and outgroup faces.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if the ORE manifests in visual working memory (VWM), an intermediate cognitive system.
• To determine if racial disparities in face processing emerge during early cognitive stages, prior to LTM storage.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments utilized three distinct VWM tasks: adaptive N-back, self-ordered pointing, and change detection.
• Performance was assessed for both ingroup and outgroup faces across these tasks.
• The relationship between VWM performance and established ORE in LTM was examined using the change detection task.

Main Results:

• Consistently decreased performance was observed for outgroup faces compared to ingroup faces across all tested VWM tasks.
• The quantity of information stored in VWM was significantly lower for outgroup faces than for ingroup faces.
• Performance variations in the change detection task correlated with the classic ORE observed in LTM.

Conclusions:

• The findings provide robust evidence that the ORE originates in early cognitive processing stages, specifically within VWM.
• This research highlights the utility of VWM paradigms for understanding the ORE.
• Future research on the ORE can benefit from integrating insights and methodologies from the VWM literature.