
"They all look alike": Understanding the "other race effect" - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/understanding-the-other-race-effect.ars
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julius_geezer
I remember looking at a high-school yearbook from the beehive hairdo era and
remarking to the owner, Geez, you all really wanted to look just alike. I went
to high school in a day and place where the girls grew their hair long and
left it down, and in looking at that yearbook, all I could see was the
beehives.

In fact, at a second look, of course the faces were quite distinguishable. No
doubt they were more readily distinguishable then and there because varying
hairdos did not distract one from the faces.

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pwim
There seems to be many factors besides race that could be the actual cause of
this, such as that people of one race are most likely to be around people of
the same race, and people's family is from the same race. Having the
hypothesis that race is the cause of this implies this is a genetic
phenomenon, whereas it seems more likely an environmental one to me.

~~~
kateray
There's a fair amount of research that suggests that the FFA (fusiform face
area, where we supposedly process faces) is really just specialized for
processing objects that we're very familiar with. For example, bird-watchers'
FFAs light up more when they're differentiating between birds, and I think
they have increased repetition suppression too.

Anyway, the theory behind that research is that we process faces differently
because we're all very familiar with them, so it would make a lot of sense if
this other-race effect is purely because Western Caucasians see Western
Caucasian faces more and East Asians see East Asian faces more.

I'd like to see the study done with people who are living in a country where
their race is a tiny minority.

~~~
joeyo
That's a really good point. This may be telling us something more general
about what the cerebral cortex is doing, too.

For example, when people learn a new language that involves phonemes very
different from those of their native tongue, they often go through a phase
where not only do they have difficulty producing the foreign sounds but have
difficulty distinguishing sounds that would seem very different to a native
speaker. For example, R and L are perceived as very similar to a native
japanese speaker and the nasal vowels of french and portuguese are notoriously
difficult for english speakers register.

It could be that Wernicke's area (were language is supposedly processed) is
really just specialized for processing complex sounds that we are very
familiar with. So you'd expect a bird-watcher specialization effect from ...
opera goers? safe crackers? sonar operators?

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robobenjie
When I (caucasian) moved first to Japan for six months I had a difficult time
telling Japanese people apart. By the time I had been there for 4 months this
effect was significantly less. In addition I remember being startled to
realize that people looked "less japanese" to me.

~~~
num1
I know exactly what you mean. I have spend enough years interacting with
people from Turkey that I no longer recognize any kind of Turkish accent.

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CoreDumpling
Somewhat related: you can quiz yourself on whether you can tell apart East
Asians' ethnicity by looking at them.

<http://alllooksame.com/exam_room.php>

I scored no better than random for face recognition, though some of the other
quizzes had fragments of text that gave the answer away.

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xtacy
Does the facial recognition signal N170 generalise/apply to other species too?
Dog faces? Cat faces?

~~~
brianpan
The article took a 2nd reading to grok, but the experiment shows that N170
recognizes the same face, but only if that face is the same ethnicity. Meaning
it is very specific. Presumably, if it can't recognize the same face of
another ethnicity, it surely can't recognize the same of another species.

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hasenj
Simple explanation: we don't know how to distinguish between faces "out of the
box", we have to be trained to do it. Most of our training happens within our
own race, so we become very good at distinguishing faces.

When presented with completely different type of faces, we have to work hard
to tell two faces apart, we can't just distinguish them on first sight.

It's like knowing to tell the alphabet from your own language vs some other
language you're encountering for the first time.

~~~
pygy_
We have specialized circuitry to process faces. People are congenitally
deficient in this regard suffer from prosopagnosia (in the same way that some
people with normal hearing are tone deaf).

That said, you're not completely off track. It is very likely that said
circuitry becomes better at disinguishing the kind of faces it has been
initially trained with.

A nice complement for this study would be to test mixed race and adopted
people.

~~~
lukeschlather
I don't have any studies on hand, but I specifically remember a lecture I
attended where it was noted that infants do not have specialized circuitry to
process faces. Their affinity for their caretakers, at least at a very early
age, is actually not a result of recognizing people, but of the caretakers
subconsciously learning how to better provoke an affectionate response.

You also saw this effect with the emotional robot Kismet at MIT. Its reactions
were totally hardwired, but it managed to fool people into believing that it
"liked" them.

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waterhouse
This seems to me a simple instance of the general fact that, for telling
things apart, you only observe as deeply as you need to, and it takes a while
to get used to observing deeper.

For example, suppose I learn the phone numbers of my neighbors. Then I meet a
friend who lives across town, and his phone number starts with 322-, while all
my neighbors' numbers start with 494-, so when I see a caller ID beginning
with 322-, then I immediately know it's him. But then I make several more
across-town friends, and holy crap now there are four numbers beginning with
322-, so now I learn to pay attention to all seven digits.

Then I meet someone at a summer camp, and his phone number is in a whole
freakin' new area code, so if I see "(408)" then I know it's him. But then if
I meet more people in 408, I'll have to learn to look at the rest of the
number when it begins with 408.

Or, think of backpacks. I have the only black backpack in my class; that makes
it easy for me to tell mine apart. But now someone else gets a black backpack,
and I say to myself, hmm, well, mine's got thick straps. Then maybe someone
gets the exact same model of backpack, and I'm like, dammit, fine, I'll write
my _name_ on mine.

Cars. Mine is a big white car. That worked fine for a few years. Then I saw
other big white cars. Mine is a Toyota minivan. Worked fine for some more
years. Then I saw another white Toyota minivan, but it had different hubcaps.
Fine. Now I've seen a few that are the same model and color of car with same
hubcaps; gotta look at the license plate to be sure.

With people, there are many ways to distinguish people. Male/female. Long
hair, frizzy hair, buzzcut. Really tall, really short. Color of skin. Color of
hair. Facial features common to certain races. Fat. Always wears a particular
hat or jacket.

At any time, people's methods of telling people apart are likely not much more
sophisticated than they need to be, and if they're thrust into a situation in
which those methods don't work well, then obviously they'll have trouble
telling people apart. And, given time, they will learn and use new methods and
get better at it.

So: There's nothing special about race, there's nothing special about faces,
and there's nothing special about finding it hard to distinguish things in
ways that you're not used to.

~~~
btilly
This is absolutely what is going on.

My brother had an interesting experience with this. He grew up with Caucasian
faces. Then moved to Taiwan. After several years there he came back to Canada.
What he quickly realized is that he had learned how to tell Chinese people
apart, but had forgotten how to tell Caucasians apart. Given that he actually
remembered a lot of Caucasians, a large fraction of the population looked like
(but wasn't) someone he knew.

He found this very confusing.

