The combined influence of the own-age, -gender, and -ethnicity biases on face recognition.

Abstract

Whether the own-group (own-ethnicity, own-gender, and own-age) biases in face recognition are based on the same mechanism and whether their effects are additive or not are as yet unanswered questions. Employing a standard old/new recognition paradigm, we investigated the combined crossover effects of the own-ethnicity, own-gender, and own-age biases in a group of 160 participants. Result showed that while face recognition accuracy decreased as the number of out-group features increased, the own-ethnicity bias appeared to have more of a unique influence on face recognition than the other biases. Furthermore, we established that in a single group of participants, these biases appear to be based on different mechanisms: the own-ethnicity bias is based on individuation whereas the own-age and own-gender biases are based on motivation.