Abstract:
The current study explored how Caucasian and Chinese participants mentally represented the face identity of veridical and spatially distorted own and other-race faces, as well as changes in these representations after exposure to novel veridical own or other-race faces. This was investigated through the novel application of individual differences multidimensional scaling, using response time as a proxy for similarity. For both participant groups, Caucasian and Chinese faces formed their own clusters in a three dimensional space, with Chinese faces typically being closer to one another than to Caucasian faces. The overall representational distances between faces increased slightly for both Caucasian and Chinese participants, regardless of any intervening exposure, and this occurred for distorted and undistorted faces. However, Chinese participants were largely consistent in their representation of spatially distorted and veridical faces, whereas Caucasian participants were largely inconsistent, suggesting variation in the face attributes used to represent and discriminate face identity. These findings are discussed with reference to contemporary issues in face perception and suggestions for further directions are offered. These include the effects of race contact on mental representations, the difficulties of dissociating subjective similarity from objective similarity, how differences in the mental representation of familiar and unfamiliar faces effect the perception of face despite changes to the visual precept, and the implication these have for a multidimensional model of face recognition.