The own-race bias for face recognition in a multiracial country

The own-race bias (ORB) is a well-documented phenomenon whereby people are more accurate at recognising faces from their own-race group compared to faces from different race groups (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). While empirical studies have reported the robustness of the ORB across racial groups, the finding that the ORB is negatively related to exposure to other-race individuals suggests that may not necessarily apply to individuals who were born and have lived in a multiracial society. This thesis fills a gap in the ORB literature by examining the role of multiracial immersion experience as well as potential perceptual/attentional mechanisms in modulating the ORB by employing a series of face memory and face perceptual tasks on different racial groups (i.e. Malaysian-Malay, Malaysian-Chinese, Malaysian-Indian, African and Western-Caucasian individuals). In Experiment 1, I demonstrated that the ORB in face memory was pronounced not only in Western-Caucasian participants, but also in Malaysian participants (Malay, Chinese, and Indian) who were raised in a racially diverse environment, implying that growing up in a profoundly multiracial society does not eliminate the ORB. In Experiment 2, I found significant correlations between memory performance for learned target faces and facial distinctiveness; most importantly, own-race faces benefited more from this distinctiveness effect than other-race faces across the four race groups. These findings fit well with Valentine’s (1991) face-space model that dimensions of face space are optimised for own-race faces, and the ORB is likely to be attributable to the inefficiency in the use of norm-based coding for other-race faces. Using a procedure identical to Experiment 1, I observed a significantly greater increment in recognition performance for other-race faces than for own-race faces when the external features (e.g., facial contour and hairline) were presented along with the internal features in Experiment 3. This finding sup