Abstract
Previous studies examining the other-race effect in school-age children mostly focused on recognition memory performance. Here we investigated perceptual discriminability for Asian-like versus Caucasian-like morph faces in school-age Taiwanese children and adults. One-hundred-and-two 5- to 12-year-old children and twenty-three adults performed a sequential same/different face matching task, where they viewed an Asian- or a Caucasian-parent face followed by either the same parent face or a different morphed face (containing 15%, 30%, 45%, or 60% contribution from the other parent face) and judged if the two faces looked the same. We computed the d’ as the sensitivity index for each age groups. We also analyzed the group mean rejection rates as a function of the morph level and fitted with a cumulative normal distribution function. Results showed that the adults and the oldest 11-12-year-old children exhibited a greater sensitivity (d’) and a smaller discrimination threshold (μ) in the Asian-parent condition than those in the Caucasian-parent condition, indicating the presence of an own-race advantage. On the contrary, 5- to 10-year-old children showed an equal sensitivity and similar discrimination thresholds for both conditions, indicating an absence of the own-race advantage. Moreover, a gradual development in enhancing the discriminability for the Asian-parent condition was observed from age 5 to 12; however, the progression in the Caucasian-parent condition was less apparent. In sum, our findings suggest that expertise in face processing may take the entire childhood to develop, and supports the perceptual learning view of the other-race effect—the own-race advantage seen in adulthood likely reflects a result of prolonged learning specific to faces most commonly seen in one’s visual environment such as own-race faces.
Highlights
The human face carries abundant visual information and social cues
The other-race effect has been reliably reported across ethnic groups (e.g., [3,4,5,6,7]) and the effect is robust under a variety of experimental conditions, including standard recognition memory tasks [8], naturalistic eyewitness memory paradigms [9,10], and a perceptual encoding-based face discrimination task [7,11,12]
To fully capture the characteristics and developmental changes in perceptual sensitivity for the Asian-parent and the Caucasian-parent conditions, we employed three data analysis methods applying to all age groups
Summary
We automatically attend to people’s gender, age, race, and facial expression, and these characteristics may well influence our social evaluations. Own-race advantage in school-age children than those of their own [1]. This phenomenon refers to as the “other-race effect” (ORE), or interchangeably the “own-race advantage” (ORA), reflecting the relative ineptness at processing individual faces of unfamiliar races or ethnic groups [2]. The other-race effect has been reliably reported across ethnic groups (e.g., [3,4,5,6,7]) and the effect is robust under a variety of experimental conditions, including standard recognition memory tasks [8], naturalistic eyewitness memory paradigms [9,10], and a perceptual encoding-based face discrimination task [7,11,12]
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