Information Search

Abstract

People are better at recognizing faces from their own race than from different races (Shapiro & Penrod, 1986; Bothwell, Brigham, & Malpass, 1989), an effect commonly known as the other-race effect. The causes of this effect have been attributed to the fact that people have more experience with faces from their own race during development (Feingold, 1914; Chance, Turner, & Goldstein, 1982; Shepard, 1981; Valentine, Chiroro, & Dixon, 1995). However, in visual search tasks, cross-race (CR) faces are found faster than same-race (SR) faces (Levin, 1996, 2000). This advantage of CR faces in visual search tasks seems at first to be inconsistent with the advantage of the SR face in recognition tasks. To account for this discrepancy, Levin proposed that there is a race feature, which is active only for CR faces. By explicitly assuming this feature, the face search data fits into a visual search paradigm in which the search asymmetry can be explained. In this paper, we will present an alternate