I know your face but not where I saw you: context memory is impaired for other-race faces.
People are more likely to falsely identify a face of another race than a face of their own race. When witnesses make identifications, they often need to remember where they have previously encountered a face. Failure to remember the context of an encounter can result in unconscious transference and lead to misidentifications. Forty-five White participants were shown White and Black faces, each presented on one of five backgrounds. The participants had to identify these faces in an old/new recognition test. If participants stated that they had seen a face, they had to identify the context in which the face had originally appeared. Participants made more context errors with Black faces than with White faces. This shows that the own-race bias extends to context memory.
Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, England. r.horry@sussex.ac.uk
Ruth
R
Horry
Daniel B
DB
Wright
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005006:Ethnicity; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception