Colloquium: On the other side of the fence: The effects of social categorisation and spatial arrangement on memory for own-race and other-race faces.

1. ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia 2. DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany

Two presentations from the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference.

Abstract Humans typically have better memory for own-race than other-race faces (“own-race bias”). Recently, Hehman et al. (2010) reported improved recognition for other-race faces categorised as belonging to participants’ social in-group (i.e., same university). Faces were studied in groups, containing both own-race and other-race faces, half of each labelled as in-group and out-group, respectively. When study faces were spatially grouped by race, participants showed a clear own-race bias. When faces were grouped by university affiliation, in-group other-race face recognition was indistinguishable from own-race face recognition. Our study aimed at extending this unique finding to other races of faces and participants. Forty Asian and 40 Caucasian participants studied Asian and Caucasian faces. Faces were presented in groups, containing equal numbers of own-university and other-university Asian and European faces. Between participants, faces were grouped either according to race or university affiliation. Eye-tracking was used to study the distribution of spatial attention to individual faces in the display. Participants demonstrated a clear own-race bias, but their memory was unaffected by the faces’ university affiliation and the criterion for their spatial grouping. Eye-tracking revealed looking biases towards both own-race and own-university faces. Results are discussed in light of theoretical accounts of the own-race bias.

Presenter: Dr. Troy Visser, Matthew Tang, David Badcock & James Enns1,

1. School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia 2. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Title: Temporal cues and the attentional blink: A further examination of the role of expectancy.

Abstract Although perception is typically constrained by limits in available processing resources, these constraints can be overcome if information about environmental properties, such as the spatial location or expected onset time of an object, can be used to direct processing resources to particular sensory inputs. Our work examines these temporal expectancy effects in greater detail in the context of the attentional blink (AB), in which identification of the second of two targets is impaired when targets are separated by less than about half-a-second. We replicate previous results showing that presenting information about the expected onset time of the second target can overcome the AB. Uniquely, we also show that knowledge about expected onset: a) reduces susceptibility to distraction; and, b) can be derived from temporal consistencies in inter-target interval across exposures as long as these consistencies are salient. These results imply that temporal expectancy can benefit object processing at perceptual and post-perceptual stages, and that participants are capable of flexibly encoding consistent timing information about environmental events to aid perception.