ABSTRACT
Interestingly, the normalization of surface information, namely texture and
colour, had little effect on Caucasian observers’ performance at recognizing
own-race and other-race faces. At first glance, these findings are inconsistent
with previous studies that demonstrated a role of surface information for
recognizing own-race faces, especially since these studies were performed
with Caucasian observers looking at Caucasian face stimuli (e.g., Bruce
et al., 1991; Bruce et al., 1992; Bruce & Langton, 1994; Caharel et al., 2009;
Davies et al., 1978; Jiang et al., 2006, 2011; Lee & Perrett, 1997; O’Toole
et al., 1999; Russell et al., 2006; Vuong et al., 2005). An important factor in
this respect may be the nature of the encoding, which was incidental here.
That is, observers in our study were not explicitly instructed to memorize the
faces. When observers were explicitly instructed to do so, they may be more
likely to also encode surface information in memory (O’Toole et al., 1999). A
possible exception here may be when surface cues indicate a different race, as
in Brebner et al.’s (2011) study. They also used an incidental encoding task
(age judgement) but found that Caucasian observers’ recognition of both
Caucasian and African faces were affected by changes to surface cues.
Another factor that may affect the extent to which Caucasian observers
encode surface information in addition to shape information may be the
familiarity of the faces. For example, the recognition of famous faces (e.g.,
Bruce et al., 1992; Bruce & Langton, 1994; Lee & Perrett, 1997) or
personally familiar faces (e.g., Russell & Sinha, 2007) can be affected by
changes to surface cues.
