Beschrijving
Examination of PhD thesis and public defense.PhD thesis abstract:
The cross-race recognition deficit (CRD) consists in the tendency for people to reveal higher accuracy when recognizing same-race (SR) faces compared to cross-race (CR). This effect spans diverse ethnic groups and countries with varied social consequences of severity. Despite ongoing debates surrounding the principal psychological mechanisms underlying the CRD, three primary explanations have emerged. Perceptual expertise theories attribute the CRD to limited exposure to and experience in processing CR faces compared to SR faces. Social-cognitive explanations propose a tendency to categorize CR faces while individuating SR faces, either through an emphasis on category-diagnostic features in CR faces or identity features in SR faces. Hybrid explanations integrate these viewpoints, expanding the scope to encompass motivation, attention, and expectations in shaping the recognition of SR and CR faces.
However, despite a few exceptions, much of the research on the CRD does not emphasize the role of social information about the target faces (i.e., behavioral descriptions and trait judgments) in face recognition. Thus, the overarching goal of this thesis is to delve into the impact of social information on the CRD. Specifically, we investigated whether social information incongruent with the stereotypes associated with CR faces could enhance recognition. This exploration started with a pre-test (Chapter 2), wherein we developed and validated two sets of behavioral descriptions for two distinct populations (the USA and Portugal), altering valence and stereotypical levels regarding the racial categories of Black and White. Subsequently, in Chapter 3, we drew on the well-documented incongruency effect on person memory, suggesting that information contradicting stereotypical expectations garners greater elaboration, attention, and recognition. However, across five experiments employing diverse manipulations, we did not find evidence supporting our hypothesis. Chapter 4 discusses the roles and relative impacts of perceptual (facial features) and social (personality traits) information in the context of the CRD. Across the three experiments, social evaluations benefited both SR and CR face recognition. Notably, although CR face recognition improved with perceptual evaluation, SR face recognition was hindered. These findings underscore the potential of personality-based social information to enhance recognition across both face races, even when the faces are those with which individuals are most familiar (i.e., SR faces). However, the results of the perceptual evaluations displayed mixed outcomes. While they improved CR face recognition, suggesting their efficacy beyond standard encoding strategies (that is, control condition, employed to more closely resemble daily life encoding strategies in which there are no instructions to memorize faces), they appeared to disrupt the standard encoding strategies employed by white participants for SR faces. In conclusion, these findings shed light on the role of social information in facial recognition. Although further research is warranted to elucidate the impact of stereotypic and counter-stereotypic information on recognition, the use of personality traits as social information shows promise for enhancing the recognition of CR faces.
Keywords: cross-race recognition deficit, stereotypes, valence, incongruency effect, social encoding, perceptual encoding
| Periode | 21 jun. 2024 |
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| Geëxamineerde | Joana Quarenta |
| Examen gehouden op |
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| Mate van erkenning | Internationaal |