The development of the own-race advantage in school-age children: A morphing face paradigm

April The development of the own-race advantage in school-age children: A morphing face paradigm Sarina Hui-Lin Chien 0 1 2 Chu-Lik Tai 1 2 Shu-Fei Yang 1 2 0 Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, China Medical University , Taichung , Taiwan 1 Graduate Institute of Neural & Cognitive Sciences, China Medical University , Taichung , Taiwan 2 Editor: Peter James Hills, Bournemouth University , UNITED KINGDOM Previous studies examining the other-race effect in school-age children mostly focused on recognition memory performance. Here we investigated perceptual discriminability for Asian-like versus Caucasian-like morph faces in school-age Taiwanese children and adults. One-hundred-and-two 5- to 12-year-old children and twenty-three adults performed a sequential same/different face matching task, where they viewed an Asian- or a Caucasianparent face followed by either the same parent face or a different morphed face (containing 15%, 30%, 45%, or 60% contribution from the other parent face) and judged if the two faces looked the same. We computed the d' as the sensitivity index for each age groups. We also analyzed the group mean rejection rates as a function of the morph level and fitted with a cumulative normal distribution function. Results showed that the adults and the oldest 1112-year-old children exhibited a greater sensitivity (d') and a smaller discrimination threshold (μ) in the Asian-parent condition than those in the Caucasian-parent condition, indicating the presence of an own-race advantage. On the contrary, 5- to 10-year-old children showed an equal sensitivity and similar discrimination thresholds for both conditions, indicating an absence of the own-race advantage. Moreover, a gradual development in enhancing the discriminability for the Asian-parent condition was observed from age 5 to 12; however, the progression in the Caucasian-parent condition was less apparent. In sum, our findings suggest that expertise in face processing may take the entire childhood to develop, and supports the perceptual learning view of the other-race effectÐthe own-race advantage seen in adulthood likely reflects a result of prolonged learning specific to faces most commonly seen in one's visual environment such as own-race faces. Introduction The human face carries abundant visual information and social cues. In daily encounters, we automatically attend to people's gender, age, race, and facial expression, and these characteristics may well influence our social evaluations. For example, adults belonging to one racial group typically find it difficult to recognize or memorize faces of other racial or ethnic groups than those of their own [ 1 ]. This phenomenon refers to as the ªother-race effectº (ORE), or interchangeably the ªown-race advantageº (ORA), reflecting the relative ineptness at processing individual faces of unfamiliar races or ethnic groups [ 2 ]. To date, the other-race effect has been reliably reported across ethnic groups (e.g., [3±7]) and the effect is robust under a variety of experimental conditions, including standard recognition memory tasks [ 8 ], naturalistic eyewitness memory paradigms [ 9,10 ], and a perceptual encoding-based face discrimination task [ 7,11,12 ]. In literature, the ORE or ORA has been demonstrated mostly as a bias in recognition memory where people can better retrieve own-race faces than other-race faces over certain retention intervals; this is particularly true for the developmental ORE literature in children. However, the existence of a recognition memory bias does not exclude the possibility that an own-race advantage may exist in the earlier perceptual encoding stage. In line with the broadly-defined perceptual expertise or learning view of the ORE (for a review see Meissner & Brigham [ 2 ]), individuals may see own-race faces as perceptually more distinctive than those faces with less experience. Using a sequential face matching task requiring a minimal load on memory retention, Walker and Tanaka demonstrated an own-race encoding advantage for Asian adults living in Canada and Canadian Caucasian participants [7]. The stimuli were a continuum of face images created by morphing an East Asian parent face with a Caucasian parent face. Their results showed that Asian participants performed better in the Asian-parent condition, whereas Caucasian participants were better at the Caucasian-parent condition. Using a similar morphing face matching task, Chen et al. examined the perceptual discriminability for Asian-parent and Caucasian-parent conditions in Taiwanese adults and found a smaller threshold for the Asian-parent condition than that for the Caucasian-parent condition, indicating cross-cultural evidence for the own-race encoding advantage [ 12 ]. Studies based on eye movement evidence also supported the own-race encoding bias. Goldinger et al. reported that while encoding other-race faces, both their Caucasian and Asian participants made fewer (and (...truncated)