Frontiers in Psychology (Mar 2014)

The other-race effect in 3-year-old German and Cameroonian children

  • Janina eSuhrke,
  • Claudia eFreitag,
  • Bettina eLamm,
  • Johanna eTeiser,
  • Ina eFassbender,
  • Sonja ePoloczek,
  • Manuel eTeubert,
  • Isabel A. Voehringer,
  • Heidi eKeller,
  • Monika eKnopf,
  • Arnold eLohaus,
  • Gudrun eSchwarzer

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00198
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5

Abstract

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Recognizing individual faces is an important human ability that highly depends on experience. This is reflected in the so called other-race effect; adults are better at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group, while very young infants do not show this specialization yet. Two experiments examined whether 3-year-old children from two different cultural backgrounds show the other-race effect. In Experiment 1, German children (N = 41) were presented with a forced choice paradigm where they were asked to recognize female Caucasian or African faces. In Experiment 2, 3-year-olds from Cameroon (N = 66) participated in a similar task using the same stimulus material. In both cultures the other-race effect was present; children were better at recognizing individual faces from their own ethnic group. In addition, German children performed at a higher overall level of accuracy than Cameroonians. The results are discussed in relation to cultural aspects in particular.

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