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Holistic Processing Is Finely Tuned for Faces of One's Own Race

Caroline Michel¹; Bruno Rossion¹; Jaehyun Han²; Chan-Sup Chung²; Roberto Caldara³

¹ Unité Cognition et Développement and Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium · ² Center for Cognitive Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea · ³ Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Recognizing individual faces outside one's race poses difficulty, a phenomenon known as the other-race effect. Most researchers agree that this effect results from differential experience with same-race (SR) and other-race (OR) faces. However, the specific processes that develop with visual experience and underlie the other-race effect remain to be clarified. We tested whether the integration of facial features into a whole representation—holistic processing—was larger for SR than OR faces in Caucasians and Asians without life experience with OR faces. For both classes of participants, recognition of the upper half of a composite-face stimulus was more disrupted by the bottom half (the composite-face effect) for SR than OR faces, demonstrating that SR faces are processed more holistically than OR faces. This differential holistic processing for faces of different races, probably a byproduct of visual experience, may be a critical factor in the other-race effect.

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01752.x

Volume

17 (7)

Pages

608-615

Language

en

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