Through the eyes of the own-race bias: Eye-tracking and pupillometry during face recognition

Abstract

People are generally better at remembering faces of their own race than faces of a different race, and this effect is known as the own-race bias (ORB) effect. We used eye-tracking and pupillometry to investigate whether Caucasian and Asian face stimuli elicited different-looking patterns in Caucasian participants in a face-memory task. Consistent with the ORB effect, we found better recognition performance for own-race faces than other-race faces, and shorter response times. In addition, at encoding, eye movements and pupillary responses to Asian faces (i.e., the other race) were different from those to Caucasian faces (i.e., the own race). Processing of own-race faces was characterized by more active scanning, with a larger number of shorter fixations, and more frequent saccades. Moreover, pupillary diameters were larger when viewing other-race than own-race faces, suggesting a greater cognitive effort when encoding other-race faces.

An eye for the I: Preferential attention to the eyes of ingroup members.

“…For example, an initial study by Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset, and Caldara (2008) utilizing an eye tracker found that when presented with White and Asian faces, White participants fixated more on the eye region and Asian participants fixated more on the nose, regardless of the group membership of the target face (i.e., whether the face was an ingroup or outgroup member). In contrast, experiments by Goldinger, He, and Papesh (2009) and Wu, Laeng, and Magnussen (2012) demonstrated that White participants made more fixations and spent significantly more time attending to the eyes of White than Asian faces. In an additional study, Goldinger et al (2009) found comparable ingroup effects with Asian participants.…”

“…For example, whereas Goldinger et al (2009) found that the extent of overall eye movements and pupil dilation differed as a function of the Own Race Bias, they did not report similar analyses for attention to specific facial features such as the eyes. Furthermore, whereas Wu et al (2012) reported analyses on dwell times related to the eyes as a function of facial recognition, their results failed to demonstrate a significant relationship between target race (Asian vs. White), area of interest (including the eyes, nose, and mouth), and the Own Race Bias. Although the primary goal of the latter experiments was to better understand cognitive effort during encoding rather than attention to specific facial features, neither of these studies provide direct evidence related to the size or direction of a relationship between preferential attention to ingroup eyes and the Own Race Bias.…”

“…The sample sizes of previous studies investigating visual attention to ingroup and outgroup eyes have ranged from 12-14 per cell (Blais et al, 2008;Nakabayashi et al, 2012) to 18-20 per cell (Goldinger et al, 2009) to 43 per cell (Wu et al, 2012 Figure 1) was set within a restricted range (136.20 to 146.96 pixels per intensity level).…”

“…Whereas only two experiments related to Asian targets have shown that White participants attend more to the eyes of White relative to Asian faces (Goldinger et al, 2009;Wu et al, 2012), a further study failed to replicate this finding by demonstrating a Western preference for attention to the eyes of both Asian and White target PREFERENTIAL ATTENTION TO THE EYES OF INGROUP MEMBERS 8 faces (Blais et al, 2008). Furthermore, this pattern of results has failed to conceptually replicate with Black faces.…”

“…By including two sets of distinct target groups, this strategy allowed us to investigate more general processes related to intergroup face perception and a preference for ingroup over outgroup eyes. We expected that White participants would attend more to the eyes of White and experimentally created ingroup faces than Black and outgroup faces.Notably, whereas previous social psychological research on whole face processing related to ingroups and outgroups has investigated the time course of general vigilance-and avoidance-based visual patterns (Amodio et al, 2003;Bean et al, 2012;, previous cognitive studies on processing of specific facial features has tended to examine visual preference over a more extended period of time (Goldinger et al, 2009;Nakabayashi et al, 2012;Wu et al, 2012). Although the former work has provided us with important information about the trajectory of distinct psychological processes related to social categories and about early automatic attentional biases toward outgroup members, because the present research focused on preferential attention to the eyes, we chose to analyze gaze patterns to ingroup and outgroup faces over a more extended period of time.…”