Abstract
Poor recognition of other-race faces is ubiquitous around the world. We resolve a longstanding contradiction in the literature concerning whether interracial social contact improves the other-race effect. For the first time, we measure the age at which contact was experienced. Taking advantage of unusual demographics allowing dissociation of childhood from adult contact, results show sufficient childhood contact eliminated poor other-race recognition altogether (confirming inter-country adoption studies). Critically, however, the developmental window for easy acquisition of other-race faces closed by approximately 12 years of age and social contact as an adult — even over several years and involving many other-race friends — produced no improvement. Theoretically, this pattern of developmental change in plasticity mirrors that found in language, suggesting a shared origin grounded in the functional importance of both skills to social communication. Practically, results imply that, where parents wish to ensure their offspring develop the perceptual skills needed to recognise other-race people easily, childhood experience should be encouraged: just as an English-speaking person who moves to France as a child (but not an adult) can easily become a native speaker of French, we can easily become “native recognisers” of other-race faces via natural social exposure obtained in childhood, but not later.
Highlights
Poorer recognition of other-race faces than own-race faces[1] is a problem of substantial real-world impact, contributing to difficulties in social interaction, inaccurate eyewitness testimony, implicit racism, and inaccurate face-to-photo matching in security settings[2,3,4]
Longstanding debate has focussed on a distinction between perceptually-based theories of ORE origin, which imply additional experience is the key factor, and theories based in social outgrouping, which imply that improving attitudes or effort are key
A difference score measure of their other-race effect or other-ethnicity effect was calculated (Fig. 2b); using a difference score for the ORE7–13 removes variance in raw Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) scores that is due to general cognitive factors, giving a purer measure of race-specific face ability and improving statistical power
Summary
Poorer recognition of other-race faces than own-race faces[1] (the other-race effect, ORE) is a problem of substantial real-world impact, contributing to difficulties in social interaction, inaccurate eyewitness testimony, implicit racism, and inaccurate face-to-photo matching in security settings[2,3,4]. Recent attempts at reconciling these two extremes have proposed that increasing motivation may be helpful only as long as a sufficient minimum degree of perceptual experience is present[6], or that motivation contributes over-and-above experience only in cultural settings where the groups differ in socioeconomic status[7]. Most of these theories predict that perceptual experience is important. We hypothesise that childhood contact may be more important than adult contact for avoiding the ORE
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