title: The role of skin colour in face recognition.
abstract: People have better memory for faces from their own racial group than for faces from other races. It has been suggested that this own-race recognition advantage depends on an initial categorisation of faces into own and other race based on racial markers, resulting in poorer encoding of individual variations in other-race faces. Here, we used a study--test recognition task with stimuli in which the skin colour of African and Caucasian faces was manipulated to produce four categories representing the cross-section between skin colour and facial features. We show that, despite the notion that skin colour plays a major role in categorising faces into own and other-race faces, its effect on face recognition is minor relative to differences across races in facial features.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel. yair1@post.tau.ac.il
authors.forename: Yair
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bar-Haim
authors.forename: Talia
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Saidel
authors.forename: Galit
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Yovel