The Cost of Racial Salience on Face Memory: How the Cross-Race Effect is Moderated by Racial Ambiguity and the Race of the Perceiver and the Perceived

Abstract

This study tested how the cross-race effect (CRE) varies across Asian, Latino, and White participants within a racially diverse context. Furthermore, it assessed how disrupting the racial categorization process of the CRE externally (racial ambiguity) and internally (cultural priming) moderates the CRE. Participants studied racially unambiguous and ambiguous Asian, Black, Latino and White faces. After studying half of the faces, participants were primed for their racial/ethnic identity or American identity. Before the prime, in racially unambiguous faces, only White participants exhibited the CRE for all other-race faces. Latino participants exhibited a limited CRE, and Asian participants did not show the CRE at all. For racially ambiguous faces, while Latino and White participants showed no CRE, Asian participants did for Latino and White faces. In addition, cultural priming moderated the CRE variously for the participant groups, suggesting that directing attention to different cultural identities may have ramifications for face processing.