Contextual cueing for own- and other-race faces

Learning other people’s faces is essential for identifying individuals, recalling past interactions with them, and guiding social behavior. However, face memory is not equally strong for all faces. A robust finding is that own-race faces are remembered better than other-race faces, a phenomenon known as the other-race effect (Malpass & Kravitz, 1969; Meissner & Brigham, 2001). One explanation is that out-group faces are more often encoded at the group level, rather than in a highly individuated manner (Hugenberg et al., 2007). This tendency may reduce individuating encoding and lead to weaker memory for other-race faces. A key open question is whether this effect is mainly expressed in explicit learning, where people intentionally try to remember and later consciously recall faces, or whether it is also observed in implicit learning, where learning proceeds without intention or conscious recall. In explicit learning, people may rely more on racial categories in processing and decision making than they do in implicit learning. In contrast, implicit learning is often stimulus-driven and relatively automatic. Thus, it is important to test whether the other-race effect is amplified primarily when explicit processing is involved, or whether it can also arise under implicit learning. In the present study, we examine whether the other-race effect appears not only in explicit learning tasks but also in a task that does not require intentional encoding or conscious retrieval. We use a contextual cueing paradigm, where repeated configurations are learned implicitly and later guide attention during a visual search task. If the mechanisms that produce the other-race effect also operate during implicit learning, contextual cueing effects should differ between own-race and other-race faces (e.g., weaker cueing effects for other-race faces). In contrast, if the other-race effect mainly reflects processes involved in conscious retrieval or decision making in explicit learning, contextual cueing should be similar for own-race and other-race faces.