Our new paper No evidence of other‐race effect for Chinese faces in Malaysian non‐Chinese population is now in press in Applied Cognitive Psychology. One of the best-replicated phenomenon in face processing research is the Other Race Effect (ORE). This effect shows that human are better recognizing faces of their own race compared to other race faces. The ORE has been classically explained in terms of experience. People tend to develop greater expertise with those faces that they persistently encounter on a daily basis, which are usually own‐race faces). However, if participants develop similar expertise with own- and other-race faces, the ORE should be reduced or even vanished.
In this paper, we explore the ORE in the context of Malaysia, a multiracial country. Malaysia is an extremely rich country in term of racial diversity. For example, According to the census of Malaysia published in 2012, in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, 45.2% of the population are Malays, 42.3% Chinese, 11% Indians, and 1.5% belong to other minorities. We had Malays, Chinese and Indian participants. They performed validated measures of face recognition for Chinese and Caucasian faces. All our participants performed poorly in the Caucasian compared to the Chinese face recognition test, showing a clear ORE. Interestingly, performance in the Chinese face recognition test was equivalent across the different race groups. Our results demonstrate he relevant role of exposure in shaping the ORE.
This paper can be found in this link.