Beyond race: social group labels and reward motivation override racial features in children's face recognition

The Other-Race Effect (ORE), characterized by superior recognition of same-race (SR) faces, remains poorly understood in children despite robust adult evidence. Developmental studies yield conflicting results, reflecting immature social categorization systems and limited cross-race experience. Drawing on the Categorization-Individuation Model, this study integrates behavioral and eye-tracking measures to investigate how social categorization (via country labels) and motivational incentives shape racial face recognition in Chinese children. Using both real and cartoon faces, we demonstrate three key findings: (1) Own-country labels enhance recognition accuracy and attentional engagement (longer fixations, larger pupil diameters) for labeled faces, overriding racial features; (2) Strong motivation eliminates the ORE by increasing configural processing for other-race (OR) faces; (3) Cartoon faces show comparable label and motivation effects, though with reduced magnitude. These results advance the CIM by demonstrating that top-down social cognition-not just bottom-up expertise-scaffolds early face processing. This research provides novel insights into children's racial face processing and has implications for bias mitigation interventions.