The Effect Of Race Perception On Face Perception:The Role Of Social Cognitive Factors

The other-race effect (ORE) refers to the own-race discrimination advantage and the other-race categorization advantage. The perceptual expertise theory explains the ORE as a result of people’s long-term perceptual exposure to own-race faces much more than the other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that short-term, social-cognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to individuate other-race faces, may also contribute to the ORE. To examine the effect of social cognitive factors on face perceptual processing, we manipulated perceptual adaptation in three studies including six experiments to investigate how race categorization and perceptual discrimination were modulated by participants’race perception, and explored the effects of the race perception on fixation pattern and the processing style in face perception.Study 1 aimed to investigate how race categorization and perceptual discrimination were modulated by race perception, which included three experiments. In Experiment 1,20 Asian participants were presented with 704 color Asian-Caucasian morphed face stimuli for a race categorization task. These stimuli were generated with morphing software (MorphTM), allowing the creation of 11 blended face stimuli (from 0:100 to 100:0 for Asian:Caucasian proportions, respectively) for each of 64 Asian-Caucasian continua. In each continuum, the face that was equally often categorized as Asian and as Caucasian was identified as the ambiguous-race face. Result showed that the 52 Asian-Caucasian ambiguous morphing faces were extracted and used as face stimuli in experiment 2 and experiment 3. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of perceptual adaptation on face race categorization performance by presenting the ambiguous-race faces after prolonged exposure (5 seconds) to a Caucasian or an Asian face. Results showed that prolonged exposure to Asian faces causes the identical ambiguous-race morphed faces to appear distinctly Caucasian, vice versa. Furthermore, the identical ambiguous-race morphing faces were categorized faster when the faces were perceived as Caucasian but slower when the faces were perceived as Asian. In Experiment 3, we examined the effects of perceptual adaptation on identity perceptual discrimination by presenting the ambiguous-race faces after prolonged exposure (5 seconds) to a Caucasian or an Asian face. Results showed that the identical ambiguous-race morphing faces were discriminated more accurate when the faces were perceived as Asian but less accurate when the faces were perceived as Caucasian.Study 2 aimed to investigate how fixation pattern was modulated by race perception. In Experiment 4, we examined the participants’fixation pattern of race categorization after perceptual adaptation with the use of an eye tracker respectively. Results from analysis with an area of interest (AOI) approach using the key AOIs of a face (eyes, nose, and mouth) showed that Chinese participants spent a significantly greater number of fixation counts and more fixation duration on the eyes of other-race Caucasian faces than the eyes of own-race Chinese faces. In contrast, they spent a significantly greater number of fixation counts and more total fixation duration on the noses of Chinese faces than the noses of Caucasian faces. The participants focused more on the nose of the face than eyes and mouth exhibiting nose-centric scanning pattern regardless of whether the faces seen were Asian or Caucasian. In addition, the more fixation counts spent on the noses of the ambiguous-race faces when they were perceived as Asian and the less fixation counts spent on the noses of the ambiguous-race faces when they were perceived as Caucasian.Study 3 aimed to investigate how processing style was modulated by race perception, which included two experiments. In Experiment 5, we investigated the holistic processing of own-race faces, other-race faces and the ambiguous-race faces by using the face-composite paradigm in a two-alternative forced-choice delayed matching task. Results showed that the composite effect was larger for own-race faces than other-race faces and there was no composite effect for ambiguous race faces. In Experiment 6, we investigated the effects of perceptual adaptation on composite effect of the ambiguous-race faces by using adaptation paradigm and face-composite paradigm. Results showed that the composite effect of the identical ambiguous-race faces were larger when the faces were perceived as Asian but smaller when the faces were perceived as Caucasian.Collectively, these findings indicate that the short-term, perceptual adaptation may not only affect participants’ face race categorization and identity perceptual discrimination, but also affect the their fixation pattern and processing style, suggesting social-cognitive factors also play a role in the ORE.