Eye movement patterns for own- and other- race faces

Abstract

The aim of this present thesis was to investigate where people direct their overt attention while learning and recognizing own- and other-race faces. Previous studies consistently found that people are better at recognizing own-race faces than other-race faces; a phenomenon mostly referred to as the “own-race bias”. Recent evidence also showed that own-race faces are processed more holistically than otherrace faces. I predicted that Caucasian participants would process Caucasian faces holistically, and process Asian faces more analytically. In all of the experiments, I used an old/new recognition task to measure the own-race bias effect. In Experiments 1-4, the aim was to obtain own-race bias in a Turkish sample with various parametric manipulations. Contrary to what was expected, Turkish participants did not recognize own-race faces better than other-race faces in any of the experiments. In Experiment 5, similar results were obtained in a Dutch sample. In Experiment 6, eye movements were recorded as participants learned and recognized own and other face races. I mainly found that eye-movement patterns did not vary systematically as people encoded own versus other-race faces; however, there were individual differences in the extend to which people were categorized as holistic or analytical processors. In addition, using similar face processing strategies during encoding and recognition increased the likelihood of giving correct responses during recognition.