Experimental Study On The Other-race Effect In Face Recognition Of Uygur University Students

Face is a non-verbal stimulus which contains rich contents in human cognitive activities. Correct identification of facial expressions plays an important role in humans'life, which has value of adaptability and function of social communication. At present, the main studies focus on working regularity of features and structure encoding on facial identifications, cross-race effect and development rule on children's facial identification. The other-race effect (ORE)is a special phenom enon in facial expression, which means that it is easier to identify and recognize faces in the same ethnic group than different ones. The present thesis focuses on the stability of ORE and the influence of facial identification which is arisen by category of facial expression, and analyzes the experimental results from various aspects based on the knowledge of cultural anthropology, human geography and sociology. Experiment 1: Subjects participated in a face recognition experiment, consisting of a learning phase and a recognition phase.Targets were photographs of Uygur andHan neutral faces, investigated whether there is the same ORE among different group students (MKM & MKH) who come from different regions.Experiment 2: Exploring the influence of facial expression type on ORE. Comparing the results of different emotional faces between Han participants and students from different regions ( MKM & MKH) after The subjects finished learning-recognition task , photographs of Uygur and Han faces with positive and negative emotional valance (joyful, sad) .Integrate experiment 1 and experiment 2, the main findings are:(1)The Uygur university students show superior performance in identifying neutral faces of their own race compared with other race. Recognizing faces of their own race more accurately than other races; performed more discrimination and sensitivity of their own race,but make higher false alarm of Han's face.The judgment standard between own and other race is impartial.(2) The facial expression type have different influence on ORE. Subjects recognized faces of joyful face more accurately and make higher false alarm to sad face, and responding time of pleased face longer than sad face. For pleased facial expression ,subjects still keeps processing advantages: The Uygur university students recognized faces of their own race more accurately than other races; performed more discrimination and sensitivity of their own race,but make higher false alarm of Han's face. There is no significant difference of all kinds indexes of face identification on sad faces between Uygur and Han university students.