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Abstract

Generally, faces of one’s own ethnicity are better remembered than faces of another race. The mechanisms of this other race effect (ORE) are still unresolved. The present study investigates whether expertise for own-race results in ORE in a discrimination task when only race-specifying information varies between faces, with no interference of identity change and no memory load. If expertise is an important factor for ORE, Caucasian participants, for example, should better discriminate between two Caucasian faces presented side by side than between two Asian faces. We tested participants in Seoul and Tübingen with pairs of Asian or Caucasian faces. Their task was to tell which face of the pair was either more Asian or more Caucasian. Although we found that Asian face pairs were unexpectedly but consistently better discriminated than Caucasian faces, this Asian advantage did not differ between both city groups. Our results show furthermore that Seoul and Tübingen participants’ discrimination performance was similar for Asian and Caucasian faces. These findings suggests that when there is no memory component involved in the task and when face appearance only differs in race-specifying information, own-race expertise does not result in better performance for own-race faces.