Caucasian and Asian observers used the same visual features for race categorisation.

Fiset, Daniel; Blais, Caroline; Zhang, Ye; Hébert, Kim; Gosselin, Frédéric; Willenbockel, Verena; Dupuis-Roy, Nicolas; Bub, Daniel N.; Tanaka, James

doi:10.1167/12.9.32

Cited by 1 publication

(4 citation statements)

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“…Concerning the eyes, our results demonstrate that the importance of the eyes as race indicator is independent of the race of the parent faces and of the cultural background of the observers. In addition, our findings extend previous studies revealing the important role of the eyes for race perception 23,27,29 by demonstrating that eyes placed in a face of a different ethnicity are sufficient for determining the perceived race of the whole face.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…These findings are discussed in terms of stronger holistic viewing in Asian participants and more analytic strategies in Caucasian participants and/or reliance on different facial cues in both groups. Similarly, eye tracking studies have reported that Westerners distribute their gaze predominantly on eyes and mouth whereas East-Asians fixate more the center of the face (the nose), which might also correspond to a more holistic visual processing of East-Asians than Westerners 2122 , but see in contrast 23 .…”

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confidence: 94%

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confidence: 99%

“…Among the studies that have investigated the importance of facial components for race or sex perception [23][24][25][26][27][28][29] , most have used degraded face stimuli; that is, participants did not see complete or normal-looking faces. Example manipulations included restricting visibility to random parts of the face through small apertures (bubble method) 23,27,30 , or filtered faces (either low-pass or high-pass filtered) 28,31 . Lastly, faces were often shown frontally, a view that does not offer a good sight of the shape of the jaw line and of the nose, which might have led to an underestimation of the importance of that facial information 32 .…”

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confidence: 99%

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Predominance of eyes and surface information for face race categorization

Bülthoff

Jung

Armann

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Faces can be categorized in various ways, for example as male or female or as belonging to a specific biogeographic ancestry (race). Here we tested the importance of the main facial features for race perception. We exchanged inner facial features (eyes, mouth or nose), face contour (everything but those) or texture (surface information) between Asian and Caucasian faces. Features were exchanged one at a time, creating for each Asian/Caucasian face pair ten facial variations of the original face pair. German and Korean participants performed a race classification task on all faces presented in random order. The results show that eyes and texture are major determinants of perceived biogeographic ancestry for both groups of participants and for both face types. Inserting these features in a face of another race changed its perceived biogeographic ancestry. Contour, nose and mouth, in that order, had decreasing and much weaker influence on race perception for both participant groups. Exchanging those features did not induce a change of perceived biogeographic ancestry. In our study, all manipulated features were imbedded in natural looking faces, which were shown in an off-frontal view. Our findings confirm and extend previous studies investigating the importance of various facial features for race perception.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

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confidence: 94%