The Other-race Effect And The Own-age Bias In Short-term Memory

Our memory for different kinds of faces is not equally well, which is reflected in two typical and stable effects, the other-race effect(ORE) and the own-age bias(OAB). These two effects are thought to bethe multiply-determined phenomena considering the most existig theories. Previous research mainly try to understand these effects from the perspective of perception and rare studies try to take the perspective of short-term memory. Taken the important role of short-term memory in cognition, the aims of the current research are to investigate the short-term memory for own- and other-race, own- and other-age faces, and step a little bit forward to explore the relationship between the other-race effect in short-term memory and recognition memory.Study 1 investigated the short-term memory for own- and other-race faces. Exp1 used the delayed match-to-sample task to measure the short-term memory for own- and other-race faces; Exp2 added a simultaneously articulatory suppression task to expel the influence of verbal encoding; Exp3 increased the suppressiondegree and varied the encoding time to testify the effect in Exp2 and explore the effect of encoding time; The resultshowed that(1) short-term memory for own-race faces was significantly better for other-race faces;(2) the ORE in short-term memory was not influenced by the verbal encoding and the encoding time.Study 2 investigated the short-term memory for own- and other-age faces. Exp4 a used the delayed match-to sample task to measure children and adults’ short-term memory for child and adult faces. Exp4 b increased the task difficulty to measure adults’ short-term memory for child and adult faces. It showed that(1)child had better short-term memory for child faces than for adult faces but(2) adult had equally better short-term memory for both child and adult faces in spite of the task difficulty.Study 3 preliminarily investigated the relationship between the other-race effect in short-term memory and recognition memory.Exp5 applied a variation of the old/new task in which the study phase is replaced by the delayed match-to sample task. Thus we could measure the short-term memory and recognition memory for own- and other-race faces in a continuous way. The results showed that the ORE in recognition memory could be effected by the ORE in short-term memory.To summary,(1)the short-term memory for own-race faces is better than for other-race faces;(2) children have better short-term memory for child faces than for adult faces and adults have equally better short-term memory for child and adult faces;(3) the ORE in the recognition memory can be influenced by short-term memory.The current research is the first one to systematically investigate the short-term memory for different kinds of faces. The results providenew data and ideas for further research to understand face cognition.