Judging Face Similarity in Own and Other Races

Abstract

Summary Four experiments measured the perceptual similarity among Japanese faces compared to similarity among American white faces as judged by white American men and women undergraduates (N = 106). In the first two experiments Ss made more-less judgments of same-race pairs of face portraits. In the third experiment, a 10-point similarity scale was introduced. In the fourth study, latency of locating a duplicate face from among many Japanese or white faces was measured as an index of facial similarity. Results of all experiments failed to support the hypothesis that Japanese faces are perceptually more alike than white faces. This suggests that for white Ss perceptual discrimination performance is not related to recognition memory deficit for Japanese faces.