I know your face but not where I saw you: Context memory is impaired for other-race faces

Abstract

People are more likely to falsely identify a face of another race than a face of their own race. When witnesses make identifications, they often need to remember where they have previously encountered a face. Failure to remember the context of an encounter can result in unconscious transference and lead to misidentifications. Forty-five White participants were shown White and Black faces, each presented on one of five backgrounds. The participants had to identify these faces in an old/new recognition test. If participants stated that they had seen a face, they had to identify the context in which the face had originally appeared. Participants made more context errors with Black faces than with White faces. This shows that the own-race bias extends to context memory.

Assessing the influence of recollection and familiarity in memory for own- versus other-race faces

“…Along similar lines, manipulations that improve encoding may not differentially improve performance on otherrace faces. For example, own-race faces appear to benefit most from those factors that promote the use of contextual information-a finding confirmed in two recent studies (Evans, Marcon, & Meissner, in press;Horry & Wright, 2008). In contrast, participants' criterion of responding is unlikely to fully account for the CRE, since manipulations that influence response bias are typically associated with differences in reported familiarity (see Yonelinas, 2002).…”

Multilevel modelling: Beyond the basic applications

“…The proportion of hits is about the same for white and black faces, but the number of false alarms is much greater for black faces. This is consistent with the memory literature (Horry & Wright, 2008).…”

Monitoring and Control of Learning Own‐Race and Other‐Race Faces

“…To date, the vast majority of work on the own‐race bias has examined candidate explanations for the effect that reflect mechanisms operating primarily at encoding (but see, e.g., Horry & Wright, ; Marcon, Susa, & Meissner, ). For example, the own‐race bias may reflect acquired perceptual expertise (e.g., Rhodes, Brake, Taylor, & Tan, ) for own‐race faces or categorization of a face that begets different forms of encoding depending on whether the face is deemed to be part of an in‐group or out‐group (e.g., Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, ; Sporer, 2001).…”

“…Although a variety of studies have examined retrospective confidence judgments for own‐race and other‐race faces made after a recognition decision (e.g., Corenblum & Meissner, ; Horry & Wright, ; Meissner, Brigham, & Butz, ; Wright, Boyd, & Tredoux, , ), to our knowledge, only two studies have examined predictions of memory performance for own‐race and other‐race faces made during or after encoding. Smith, Stinson, and Prossor () had participants watch a video of a crime committed by an own‐race or other‐race perpetrator.…”