Constructing a cross-race face identity triad test

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Forensic Science

Background:

• Cross-race face identification presents significant challenges.
• Existing tests lack standardized difficulty and control for response bias.
• No publicly available tests assess own-race versus other-race face identification abilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce the Cross-Race Face Identity Triad (CR-FIT) test.
• Provide a challenging and unbiased measure of face identity matching.
• Quantify the own-race advantage in face identification.

Main Methods:

• Developed the CR-FIT test using face-image triads to eliminate response bias.
• Employed machine and human pre-screening to ensure stimulus comparability across African American (AA) and Caucasian (CA) faces.
• Validated item difficulty using algorithm performance and AA/CA observer data.

Main Results:

• The CR-FIT test demonstrated a classic other-race effect: participants identified own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces.
• No significant effect of item race on performance was observed.
• Untrained participants performed above chance but below ceiling, indicating test suitability for diverse ability levels.

Conclusions:

• The CR-FIT test offers a robust and accessible tool for studying cross-race face identification.
• Findings confirm and quantify the other-race effect in face identity matching.
• The test is available on an open science platform for research use.