Ethnicity
Differences in own- versus other-race face recognition and perceptual discrimination was first researched in 1914 Humans tend to perceive people of other races than themselves to all look alike:
Other things being equal, individuals of a given race are distinguishable from each other in proportion to our familiarity, to our contact with the race as whole. Thus, to the uninitiated American all Asiatics look alike, while to the Asiatics, all White men look alike.
This phenomenon is known as the cross-race effect, own-race effect, other-race effect, own race bias or interracial-face-recognition-deficit. The effect occurs as early as 170ms in the brain with the N170 brain response to faces.
A meta-analysis, Mullen has found evidence that the other-race effect is larger among White subjects than among African American subjects, whereas Brigham and Williamson (1979, cited in Shepherd, 1981) obtained the opposite pattern. Shepherd also reviewed studies that found a main effect for race efface like that of the present study, with better performance on White faces, other studies in which no difference was found, and yet other studies in which performance was better on African American faces. Overall, Shepherd reports a reliable positive correlation between the size of the effect of target race (indexed by the difference in proportion correct on same- and other-race faces) and self-ratings of amount of interaction with members of the other race, r(30) = .57, p < .01. This correlation is at least partly an artifact of the fact that African American subjects, who performed equally well on faces of both races, almost always responded with the highest possible self-rating of amount of interaction with white people (M = 4.75), whereas their white counterparts both demonstrated an other-race effect and reported less other-race interaction (M = 2.13); the difference in ratings was reliable, £(30) = 7.86, p < .01
Further research points to the importance of other-race experience in own- versus other-race face processing (O'Toole et al., 1991; Slone et al., 2000; Walker & Tanaka, 2003). In a series of studies, Walker and colleagues showed the relationship between amount and type of other-race contact and the ability to perceptually differentiate other-race faces (Walker & Tanaka, 2003; Walker & Hewstone, 2006a,b; 2007). Participants with greater other-race experience were consistently more accurate at discriminating between other-race faces than were participants with less other-race experience.
In addition to other-race contact, there is suggestion that the own-race effect is linked to increased ability to extract information about the spatial relationships between different features. Richard Ferraro writes that facial recognition is an example of a neuropsychological measure that can be used to assess cognitive abilities that are salient within African-American culture. Daniel T. Levin writes that the deficit occurs because people emphasize visual information specifying race at the expense of individuating information when recognizing faces of other races. Further research using perceptual tasks could shed light on the specific cognitive processes involved in the other-race effect. The question if the own-race effect can be overcome was already indirectly answered by Ekman & Friesen in 1976 and Ducci, Arcuri, Georgis & Sineshaw in 1982. They had observed that people from New Guinea and Ethiopia who had had contact with white people before had a significantly better emotional recognition rate.
Studies on adults have also shown sex differences in face recognition. Men tend to recognize fewer faces of women than women do, whereas there are no sex differences with regard to male faces.
Read more about this topic: Face Perception