Discrimination of faces of the same and other race and gender modulated by familiarity

Abstract

This study aimed to replicate, for the first time on Serbian population, the own-race bias (ORB), a classical effect from the face perception domain. The ORB was additionally contrasted with familiarity and the own-gender bias (OGB). Recognition accuracy for own race faces was higher in comparison both to African (Z=3.29, p<0.01) and Asian faces (Z= 2.59, p<0.01). The introduction of famous faces led to a significant drop in the ORB. However, in all of the conditions a "seen before" effect was measured, suggesting better recognition for own race faces, independent of familiarity. The OGB was obtained for own-race faces (χ2(28, 7) = 119, 34 p <0, 05), while there were no differences in recognition accuracy between the own and the other-race faces of the other gender. These results imply that the ORB could be explained, at least partially, by the OGB. However, these results were obtained on an exclusively female sample. © 2013 by the Serbian Psychological Association.