Age and lineup type differences in the own-race bias

Abstract

The own-race bias (ORB) suggests that recognition for faces of one's own race is superior to recognition of other-race faces. A popular explanation for the ORB is amount of interracial contact, which may have cohort effects for older and younger adults. We compared White younger and older adults on the ORB utilizing a hybrid facial recognition and full diagnostic lineup (i.e., simultaneous and sequential target absent and target present lineups) paradigm. Both younger and older adults demonstrated an ORB. Signal detection estimates suggest younger adults compared to older adults have better discrimination accuracy for own-race over other-race faces. Interracial contact did not explain recognition for younger adults, but was related to a shift in response criterion for older adults.

A signal-detection analysis of eyewitness identification across the adult lifespan.

“…This finding should be interpreted with caution, though, because the young and older groups were also equivalent in discriminability, so this study does not tell us whether older adults can assess the accuracy of their memories to the same extent as young adults when their memory ability is worse. Nevertheless, many other eyewitness studies have found that older adults tend to assign lower confidence ratings to their identification decisions on average than young adults, which may suggest that older adults are aware that they are less accurate (Goodsell, Neuschatz, & Gronlund, 2009;Memon et al, 2002;Neuschatz et al, 2005;Searcy et al, 2001;Wylie et al, 2015; but see Havard & Memon, 2009;Searcy et al, 1999). If middle-aged and older adults are able to gauge the likely accuracy of their memories, then they should be as accurate as young adults at each level of confidence, despite any decline in memory ability that occurs with age.…”

“…Some lineup studies have found that accuracy and confidence are better correlated in young people than in older people (Adams-Price, 1992;Memon, Hope, Bartlett, & Bull, 2002;Wylie et al, 2015), and a recent review concluded that confidence should not be used as a proxy for accuracy in older adults (Erickson, Lampinen, & Moore, 2015). Also, older adults often make highconfidence errors (Dodson, Bawa, & Krueger, 2007;Dodson, Bawa, & Slotnick, 2007;Dodson & Krueger, 2006), and older adults who rate their memory self-efficacy as higher are more likely to make false identifications (Searcy et al, 2000;Searcy et al, 2001).…”

“…One study calculated overall choosing rate and signaldetection estimates of discrimination (d') and response bias (c) for 21 published lineup studies. The authors concluded that while older adults do choose from lineups at a higher rate than young adults, it was an impaired ability to discriminate between innocent and guilty suspects that hindered older adults' performance (Fitzgerald & Price, 2015; see also Wylie, Bergt, Haby, Brank, & Bornstein, 2015). By contrast, Key et al (2015) measured people's ability to discriminate between innocent and guilty suspects in fair lineups (where the foils matched the appearance of the suspect) and unfair lineups (where the suspect stood out because the foils did not match the appearance of the suspect) using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.…”

“…Many of the lineup studies (e.g., Adams-Price, 1992; Memon et al, 2002;Wylie et al, 2015) have calculated the correlation coefficient, yet a low correlation coefficient does not necessarily indicate a poor relationship between confidence and accuracy (Juslin, Olsson, & Winman, 1996). Correlation coefficients reflect the relationship between categorical confidence judgments (0, 10, 20, etc.…”

Race effects in facial recognition: the evolution

“…In a showup, observing an innocent person of the same race of the perpetrator suspect increased the identification of false lineups [5]. Young people have a better accuracy when discriminating their own race from other races, which is not influenced by interracial contact, unlike what happens with elderly [6]. Also, Caucasian people were found to make more mistakes in identifications, comparing to other races, and it's more common to mistake identity and expressions of Caucasian than Asian faces [7].…”