The Race Effect In Face Recognition Behavior And Electrophysiology Study

Face is the stimulation form which people most accept in the daily life. Through face recognition, people may obtain lots of information such as gender, age, race and so on. In face perception, other-race effect is a specific phenomenon of social cognition, which represents easier identification of individual faces from one's own race comparing to other-race faces.The researchers tended to use "recognition" paradigm to study other-race effect in previous studies, and the result often concentrated in the difference of processing methods and neural mechanisms between the east and the west faces. In this article, we adds the Africa faces to the simulation materials, aiming to find the neural mechanisms in the encoding and to research the retrieval stage of face recognition and the relative position of three different race faces in the multi-dimensional face space.Our research contains two experiments, In the first experiment we uses "recognition" paradigm to study the DM effect in encoding phase and Old/New effect in retrieval phase respectively. In the second experiment we uses sequential face identification task to study the participants'discriminability for race information change and the relative position of three different race faces in the multi-dimensional face space.Finally, we can draw the following conclusions from the data of the research.1. The participants have higher discrimination for native faces than other-race face in the face perception.2. The advantage of face processing for different race face existed in the encoding stage of face perception, and the DM effect (difference in subsequent memory) of own race face is more significant than other two race faces.3. In the retrieval stage, participants responded stronger Old/New effect for own race, and the differences are also significant with other two races.4. The specific component N170 was affected by the race and has a difference in the latency period.5. The participants have greater sensitivity to the change of their own race and black faces'feature. And it suggests that in multiple face space participants'own race and black face are less tightly clustered than the white, and the representation of white faces needs more distance from the center of face space with stronger concentration.