Abstract
It has long been known that a person’s race can affect their decisions about people of another race; an observation that clearly taps into some deep societal issues. However, in order to behave differently in response to someone else’s race, you must first categorise that person as other-race. The current study investigates the process of race-categorisation. Two groups of participants, Asian and Caucasian, rapidly classified facial images that varied from strongly Asian, through racially intermediate, to strongly Caucasian. In agreement with previous findings, there was a difference in category boundary between the two groups. Asian participants more frequently judged intermediate images as Caucasian and vice versa. We fitted a decision model, the Ratcliff diffusion model, to our two choice reaction time data. This model provides an account of the processes thought to underlie binary choice decisions. Within its architecture it has two components that could reasonably lead to a difference in race category boundary, these being evidence accumulation rate and a priori bias. The latter is the expectation or prior belief that a participant brings to the task, whilst the former indexes sensitivity to race-dependent perceptual cues. Whilst we find no good evidence for a difference in a priori bias between our two groups, we do find evidence for a difference in evidence accumulation rate. Our Asian participants were more sensitive to Caucasian cues within the images than were our Caucasian participants (and vice versa). These results support the idea that differences in perceptual sensitivity to race-defining visual characteristics drive differences in race categorisation. We propose that our findings fit with a wider view in which perceptual adaptation plays a central role in the visual processing of own and other race.
Highlights
The other-race effect has been a topic of scientific investigation for some 40 years or so; it’s known by a number of other names, including the cross race effect and the own race advantage
It is not surprising that the body of research dealing with the other-race effect is considerable, and that it is comprised of contributions from a variety of different areas
Note that we identify evidence accumulation rate as a perceptual factor and a priori bias as a cognitive factor; this is in the narrow sense that these are the obvious labels to attach to those components of the diffusion model in the context of the present study
Summary
The other-race effect has been a topic of scientific investigation for some 40 years or so; it’s known by a number of other names, including the cross race effect and the own race advantage These terms primarily refer to what is a well established finding, namely that we have a tendency to better recognise the faces of members of our own race than those of another Over the past decade or so there have been a number of excellent reviews of the other raceeffect, both in terms of results and underlying theories
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