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Although it is well established that people are better at recognizing own-race faces than at recognizing other-race faces, the neural mechanisms mediating this advantage are not well understood. In this study, Caucasian participants were trained to differentiate African American (or Hispanic) faces at the individual level (e.g., Joe, Bob) and to categorize Hispanic (or African American) faces at the basic level of race (e.g., Hispanic, African American). Behaviorally, subordinate-level individuation training led to improved performance on a posttraining recognition test, relative to basic-level training. As measured by event-related potentials, subordinate- and basic-level training had relatively little effect on the face N170 component. However, as compared with basic-level training, subordinate-level training elicited an increased response in the posterior expert N250 component. These results demonstrate that learning to discriminate other-race faces at the subordinate level of the individual leads to improved recognition and enhanced activation of the expert N250 component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People usually categorize objects more quickly at the basic level (e.g., “dog”) than at the subordinate (e.g., “collie”) or superordinate (e.g., “animal”) levels. Notable exceptions to this rule include objects of expertise, faces, or atypical objects (e.g., “penguin,” “poodle”), all of which show faster than normal subordinate-level categorization. We hypothesize that the subordinate-level reaction time advantage for faces is influenced by their discriminability relative to other faces in the stimulus set. First, we replicated the subordinate-level advantage for faces (Experiment 1) and then showed that a basic-level advantage for faces can be elicited by increasing the perceptual similarity of the face stimuli, making discrimination more difficult (Experiment 2). Finally, we repeated both effects within subjects, showing that individual faces were slower to be categorized in the context of similar faces and more quickly categorized among diverse faces (Experiment 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do young children recognize faces differently than older children and adults? Previous research (Carey & Diamond, 1977) has suggested that, before the age of 8, children recognize a face by its individual features; after the age of 8, they switch to a whole-face (holistic) recognition strategy. The part-whole paradigm provides a suitable test for the encoding switch hypothesis. In this paradigm, memory for a face part is probed when the part is presented in isolation and in the whole face. The difference in performance between the two test conditions serves as an index of holistic processing. Results from such studies reveal that even 6-year-olds remember parts from upright faces better when tested in the whole-face context than in isolation. When faces are inverted, the holistic processes of young children and older children are disrupted. These results indicate that counter to the encoding switch hypothesis, children recognize faces holistically by 6 years of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]