The Cost of Racial Salience on Face Memory: How the Cross-Race Effect is Moderated by Racial Ambiguity and the Race of the Perceiver and the Perceived

Memory for diverse faces in a racially attentive context

“…Half of the faces were high in ethnic typicality and the other half were low in ethnic typicality according to the database’s ratings (Ma et al, 2015 ). Faces were similar in attractiveness, unusualness, and age (see Marsh 2021 ). Two random orders of faces were used in the experiment.…”

“…While past studies suggest that the type of other-race face impacts the moderation of the CRE (Marsh, 2021 ; Wan et al, 2015 ), they also suggest that factors impacting racial salience may have a moderating role in the CRE. Thus, this study assesses how the size of the CRE varies by the type of other-race face and by the racial ambiguity of those other-race faces.…”

“…Models meant to explain the CRE differ in the causal weight they assign to perceptual expertise in processing same and other-race faces, the process of categorizing faces into a shared social group, and the degree of motivation one has to encode individuating facial features (see the dual-route approach by Wan et al, 2015 , the categorization-individuation model by Hugenberg et al, 2010 , and the ingroup/outgroup model by Sporer, 2001 ). As evidence of socio-cognitive moderators of the CRE grow, theories attempt to accommodate how the effect varies not only by perceptual expertise (Hancock & Rhodes, 2008 ; Michel, et al, 2006 ; Tanaka, et al, 2013 ), but also by moderating the racial salience internally via cultural priming techniques (Marsh, 2021 , Marsh et al, 2016 , and Pauker et al, 2013 ) and externally through the presentation of racially ambiguous faces (Pauker et al, 2009 ; Maclin & Malpass, 2001 ). As a result, variations in racial salience either through contextual factors that highlight race, or racial ambiguity that blurs race remains a factor of interest.…”

“…If individuals scan other-race faces that are racially ambiguous for facial markers to aid in racial categorization, the behavior may promote the encoding of more individuating features compared to other-race faces that are easily categorized into a racial group. In fact, Marsh ( 2021 ) found that Asian participants showed the CRE among racially ambiguous faces (not computerized morphs, but naturally occurring faces), that is, they recognized racially ambiguous Asian faces better than racially ambiguous Latino and White faces, but showed no CRE among racially unambiguous faces. Perhaps, these participants within a racially diverse context are less likely to show the CRE, unless confronted with a scenario where a face’s racial category is in question and there is an impulse to determine which faces are Asian.…”

“…Moreover, these effects are tested within two different experimental contexts. One context (experiment 1)—that consists of data from a larger project, some of which was published in Marsh ( 2021 )—explicitly draws attention to race by having participants identify the race of each face they study. In the other context (experiment 2), the racial identification task was not used.…”