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.

Abstract

This study tested how the cross-race effect (CRE) varies across Asian, Latino, and White participants within a racially diverse context. Furthermore, it assessed how disrupting the racial categorization process of the CRE externally (racial ambiguity) and internally (cultural priming) moderates the CRE. Participants studied racially unambiguous and ambiguous Asian, Black, Latino and White faces. After studying half of the faces, participants were primed for their racial/ethnic identity or American identity. Before the prime, in racially unambiguous faces, only White participants exhibited the CRE for all other-race faces. Latino participants exhibited a limited CRE, and Asian participants did not show the CRE at all. For racially ambiguous faces, while Latino and White participants showed no CRE, Asian participants did for Latino and White faces. In addition, cultural priming moderated the CRE variously for the participant groups, suggesting that directing attention to different cultural identities may have ramifications for face processing.

What does cultural research tell us about memory?

“…The studies in the special issue demonstrate the important role of culture in influencing a broad range of memory processes, constructs, and phenomena. The topics range from the own-race memory bias in facial recognition (Leffers & Coley, 2021; Marsh, 2021) to false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (J. Wang, Otgaar, Santtila, Shen, & Zhou, 2021); from episodic memory specificity (Leger & Gutchess, 2021) to semantic memory for facts (Stanley, Taylor, & Marsh, 2021); from vicarious memories and intergenerational narratives (Chen, Cullen, Fivush, Wang, & Reese, 2021) to the functions (Wasti, Aydin, Altunsu, & Beyhan, 2021), characteristics (Alea, Ali, & Ali, 2021), and lifespan retrieval of autobiographical memory (Bohn & Bundgaard-Nielsen, 2021); and from collaborative remembering in group settings (Pepe, Wang, & Rajaram, 2021) to living historical memory (Liu et al, 2021) and collective memory (Choi, Abel, Siqi-Liu, & Umanath, 2021).…”

“…The studies in the special issue go beyond mere between-group comparisons and examine the cultural mechanisms underlying remembering. Thus, the own-race memory bias in facial recognition is associated with essentialist beliefs about racial groups (Leffers & Coley, 2021) and is influenced by individuals’ cultural identities (Marsh, 2021). Memory reconstruction results in false memories that reflect variations in perceptual processes (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2004) and self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991) across cultural communities (J.…”

“…Furthermore, at the situation level, researchers examine the dynamic, constructive process where culturally prescribed modes of thinking interact with situational characteristics (e.g., with whom one is interacting, the salience of a cultural frame, and contextual demands) in shaping individuals’ mental processes (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez, 2000; Wang, 2018). Thus, making American identities salient increases memory accessibility to well-known information about the US (Stanley et al, 2021), working in an ethnically diverse group setting appears to activate stereotype threat and in turn undermines memory performance in ethnic minority individuals (Pepe et al, 2021), and racial ambiguity moderates the expression of memory bias in facial recognition (Marsh, 2021). Finally, at the temporal level, given culture being an ever-changing system of meaning (Greenfield, 2018; Varnum & Grossmann, 2017), a historical perspective is essential for understanding the influence of culture on memory.…”

“…The study by Liu et al (2021) include participants from 40 countries that have different value systems and levels of development. Several studies also focus on subcultural groups in the same country or region, including Afro-, Indo-, and Mixed-Trinidadians from the Caribbean (Alea et al, 2021), New Zealand adolescents of Chinese, Māori, and European descents (Chen et al, 2021), and Asian, Latino, African, and White Americans (Leffers & Coley, 2021; Leger & Gutchess, 2021; Marsh, 2021; Pepe et al, 2021). Rather than treating culture simply as an independent variable, the studies take close looks at the characteristics of the cultural communities and examine cultural elements relevant to their research questions.…”

“…They inform us on how our memories are connected with our individual, cultural, and national identities (Alea et al, 2021; Choi et al, 2021; Liu et al, 2021; Stanley et al, 2021). They inform practices in legal settings such as eye-witness testimony and identification (Leffers & Coley, 2021; Leger & Gutchess, 2021; Marsh, 2021; J. Wang et al, 2021).…”