An ‘other-Race Effect’ for Categorizing Faces by Sex

Abstract

It is well-known that people recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races-a phenomenon often referred to as the 'other-race effect'. Using brief presentations of faces, we show a similar effect for the task of discriminating the sex of a face. Specifically, Caucasian observers discriminated male and female Caucasian faces more accurately/efficiently than did Oriental observers, and Oriental observers discriminated male and female Japanese faces more accurately/efficiently than did Caucasian observers. This result indicates that, under suboptimal viewing conditions, the identification of even the most salient of facial characteristics-face sex-is impaired for other-race faces. This finding suggests, also, that the nature and diversity of our experience with faces may affect not only the quality of the face representation for later access by recognition processes, but also the efficiency of a perceptual discrimination process. Intriguingly, too, we found that female observers, for both races tested, were considerably more accurate at the sex classification task than were male observers.

Holistic processing underlies gender judgments of faces

“…A benefit for categorizing the gender of own-race normal upright faces has previously been shown by O'Toole, Peterson, and Deffenbacher (1996). Nevertheless, as was pointed out by Zhao and Bentin (2008), O'Toole et al's results might come from their specific procedures and heterogeneous Asian participants.…”

Face recognition and aging: Effects of target age and memory load

“…People generally find it easier to recognize faces of members of their own racial group than of members of other racial groups (Brigham & Barkowitz, 1978;Feinman & Entwisle, 1976;Lavrakas, Buri, & Mayzner, 1976;Shepherd, 1981;Shepherd, Deregowski, & Ellis, 1974). Associated with the cross-race effect is the often reported feeling that otherrace faces "all look alike" (O'Toole, Peterson, & Deffenbacher, 1996). It is possible that an analogous effect occurs with the identification of people of the same age versus those of other ages.…”

Race recognition using local descriptors

“…to identify a person. It is well known, for example, that people are more accurate at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of other races [1] [2]. Therefore, categorizing faces into different race groups should help to reduce the search space as well as to increase the accuracy of person identification.…”