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Abstract

Previous studies have shown that face race influences various aspects of face processing, including face identification (Meissner Brigham, 2001), holistic processing (Michel et al., 2006), and processing of featural and configural information (Hayward et al., 2008). However, whether these various aspects of other-race effects (ORE) arise from the same underlying mechanism or from independent ones remain unclear. To address this question, we measured those manifestations of ORE with different tasks, and tested whether the magnitude of those OREs are related to each other. Each participant performed three tasks. (1) The original and a Chinese version of Cambridge Face Memory Tests (CFMT, Duchaine Nakayama, 2006; McKone et al., 2012), which were used to measure the ORE in face memory. (2) A part/whole sequential matching task (Tanaka et al., 2004), which was used to measure the ORE in face perception and in holistic processing. (3) A scrambled/blurred face recognition task (Hayward et al., 2008), which was used to measure the ORE in featural and configural processing. We found a better recognition performance for own-race than other-race faces in all three tasks, confirming the existence of an ORE across various tasks. However, the size of the ORE measured in all three tasks differed; we found no correlation between the OREs in the three tasks. More importantly, the two measures of the ORE in configural and holistic processing tasks could not account for the individual differences in the ORE in face memory. These results indicate that although face race always influence face recognition as well as configural and featural processing, different underlying mechanisms are responsible for the occurrence of ORE for each aspect of face processing tested here.