Other-Race Scanning Effect:Contributions From Facial Physiognomic Information And Knowledge Of Racial Categories

Efficient face processing is important for social survival. In the contemporary diversified society, people encounter both own-and other-race faces. Therefore, exploration into this issue would be helpful for understanding the difference of face processing for own-and other-race faces and improve inter-ethnicity interactions.Recent studies have demonstrated that differential scanning strategies were employed when processing own-and other-race faces.We called this phenomenon as the other-race scanning effect. Specially, for the Chinese participants, they fixated more on the eye region of Caucasian faces than that of Chinese faces, while fixated more on the nose region of Chinese faces than that of Caucasian faces. However, potential reasons for this differential scanning strategy are still unknown. We conducted four experiments to test whether it is due to top-down knowledge of racial categories or bottom-up facial physiognomy. In all of these four experimrnts, we used eyelink 1000 eye tracker to record Chinese participants’ fixations when they processed faces.Study 1 and Study 2 were conducted to test whether racial categories could influence faces scanning patterns by using identity recognition and race categorization related tasks. In study 3, we investigated a more general phenomenon that whether categorizing other people as in-group versus out-group members is sufficient to elicit a pattern of face scanning analogous to that of the other-race scanning effect. In study 4, we combined a Chinese face and a Caucasian face to make a series of new faces that had different proportional of these two races’ physiognomy to explore the influence of facial physiognomy on faces scanning.The results revealed that:(1) consistent with previous studies, we found that Chinese participants focused more on the nose region of the Chinese faces than that of the Caucasian faces while more on the eye region of the Caucasian faces than that of the Chinese faces; (2) Chinese participants scanned the eyes, nose, and mouth equally for the racially ambiguous faces categorized as Chinese comparedwith those categorized as Caucasian; (3) A more general phenomenon that categorizing other people as in-group versus out-group members also coudn’t elicit a pattern of face scanning similiar to that of the other-race scanning effect; (4) As a face had more Chinese physiognomy (thus less Caucasian physiognomy), Chinese participants tended to scan more on the nose and mouth, but scan less on the eyes.These results suggest that differential scanning strategy for own-and other-races is not due to top-down knowledge of racial categories but bottom-up facial physiognomy.