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Abstract:
Recognition of own-race faces tend to be better than that of
other-race faces. Although this other-race effect has been
frequently demonstrated with different tasks, whether it is
observed when testing in visual working memory has not yet
been established. Here we investigated whether visual working memory of own- and other-race faces differs in terms of memory capacity (i.e., how many faces can be hold in memory) and memory precision (i.e., how well a face can be maintained in memory). Using a continuous recall paradigm, participants first saw 3 or 6 target faces shown in different locations, and then either with or without a delay, they were asked to find one target face among a continuum of facial morphs. Their responses showed that they had a higher guessing rate (i.e., smaller memory capacity) for other-race faces than for own-race faces. This was true whether memory was probed with a 4 seconds delay or a 10 seconds delay. However, we found no difference in terms of memory precision between own- and other-race faces. Hence, the other-race effect is also found in visual working memory, but only in terms of memory capacity. These results indicate that the advantage in recognition of own-race faces is caused by higher capacity, but not better memory quality, in encoding these faces into memory.
