The Developmental Research Of Neural Mechanisms Of The Other-Race Effect

Human face contains a lot of information, such as individual identity, gender, race and emotional state, so face recognition is a very important ability in daily life, and it seems that human beings are good at that. But we can easily find it is difficult to identify the other-race face, because the other-race faces look like the same for us. This is named other-race effect (ORE). Specifically, this effect refers to a own-race recognition advantage:individual recognition of own-race faces is more accurate and rapid than recognition of other-race faces. Since the1970s, psychologists pay close attention to other-race effect, and achieve many valuable research results. However, most of the previous studies focus on behavior research, and there is a little research about the neural mechanisms of other-race effect. Moreover, most the objects of these studies are adults, and there is no research about the children’neural mechanism of other-race effect. This is because children’s self-control ability is limited, and the main instruments of neural mechanisms, such as fMRI and ERP, need the subjects to keep motionless during the experiment. However, the fNIRS allows the subjects to move during the experiment, so the present study attempts to use this apparatus to research the children’neural mechanisms of ORE.The present study included two experiments, we use the ’learning-to recognize’ paradigm, the picture of Chinese and Caucasus as stimulus, to research the adults’ ORE in the first experiment, and use fNIRS to monitor the subjects’cerebral cortex activity. We use the same paradigm to research children" ORE to research the children’ORE in the second experiment, but considering the children’memory ability and memory skill are immature, so we reduce the amount of face pictures, and the fNIRS is also used to monitor the activities of the cerebral cortex activity.The results of the present study show that:1. Adults and children subjects are not significantly better at recognizing the own-race face than the other-race face.2. The signal activated by the old Chinese faces is significantly higher than the signal aroused by the old Caucasus faces in the adults’frontal area.3. The signal activated by the new Chinese faces is significantly higher than the signal aroused by the new Caucasus face in adults’occipital area.4. These is a significantly difference between the peak value and latent time activated by Chinese faces and the peak value and latent time activated by Caucasus faces in adults’frontal and occipital areas.5. The signal activated by the Chinese faces is significantly different with the signal aroused by the Caucasus faces in children’frontal and occipital areas.6. There is a significantly age effect among the children’neural mechanisms of ORE.7. ORE is not only a visual effect, it also connects with the frontal area.8. These is a significant correlation between the behavior response and the cerebral cortex activity of ORE.