PUBLIC TALK: Perceiving Facial Identity in Own- vs. Other-Race Faces: New Insights About Why Our Perception of Identity in Other-Race Faces is so Error-Prone

Recognizing facial identity is challenging: Two photos of the same person can look quite different and photos of two different people can look very similar. Making decisions about photo identification—something passport officers, eyewitnesses and shop clerks do every day—is error prone, especially when viewing other-race and other-age faces. This is because our perception of identity in photos of unfamiliar faces is image-dependent; a small change in appearance (e.g., in lighting, make-up, facial expression) often is perceived as a change in identity. Such errors are rare when a face is familiar. Using a variety of methods (e.g., Visual Working Memory, training, and isolating specific cues to identity) I’ll explore why it is so hard to recognize identity in photos of other-race faces and why it is so hard for new other-race faces to become familiar.