Unraveling other-race face perception with GAN-based image reconstruction

The other-race effect (ORE) is the disadvantage of recognizing faces of another race than one's own. While its prevalence is behaviorally well documented, the representational basis of ORE remains unclear. This study employs StyleGAN2, a deep learning technique for generating photorealistic images to uncover face representations and to investigate ORE's representational basis. To this end, we collected pairwise visual similarity ratings with same- and other-race faces across East Asian and White participants exhibiting robust levels of ORE. Leveraging the significant overlap in representational similarity between the GAN's latent space and perceptual representations in human participants, we designed an image reconstruction approach aiming to reveal internal face representations from behavioral similarity data. This methodology yielded hyper-realistic depictions of face percepts, with reconstruction accuracy well above chance, as well as an accuracy advantage for same-race over other-race reconstructions, which mirrored ORE in both populations. Further, a comparison of reconstructions across participant race revealed a novel age bias, with other-race face reconstructions appearing younger than their same-race counterpart. Thus, our work proposes a new approach to exploiting the utility of GANs in image reconstruction and provides new avenues in the study of ORE.