Tullis Jonathan G, Benjamin Aaron S, Liu Xiping
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA,
Mem Cognit. 2014 Aug;42(6):863-75. doi: 10.3758/s13421-014-0409-y.
People often recognize same-race faces better than other-race faces. This cross-race effect (CRE) has been proposed to arise in part because learners devote fewer cognitive resources to encode faces of social out-groups. In three experiments, we evaluated whether learners' other-race mnemonic deficits are due to "cognitive disregard" during study and whether this disregard is under metacognitive control. Learners studied each face either for as long as they wanted (the self-paced condition) or for the average time taken by a self-paced learner (the fixed-rate condition). Self-paced learners allocated equal amounts of study time to same-race and other-race faces, and having control over study time did not change the size of the CRE. In the second and third experiments, both self-paced and fixed-rate learners were given instructions to "individuate" other-race faces. Individuation instructions caused self-paced learners to allocate more study time to other-race faces, but this did not significantly reduce the size of the CRE, even for learners who reported extensive contact with other races. We propose that the differential processing that people apply to faces of different races and the subsequent other-race mnemonic deficit are not due to learners' strategic cognitive disregard of other-race faces.
人们通常对同种族面孔的识别能力优于其他种族面孔。这种跨种族效应（CRE）被认为部分是由于学习者在对面孔进行编码时，分配给社会外群体面孔的认知资源较少。在三项实验中，我们评估了学习者对其他种族面孔的记忆缺陷是否是由于学习过程中的“认知忽视”，以及这种忽视是否受元认知控制。学习者以两种方式学习每张面孔：一是根据自己的意愿学习任意时长（自定节奏条件），二是按照自定节奏学习者的平均用时学习（固定节奏条件）。自定节奏的学习者在同种族和其他种族面孔上分配的学习时间相同，并且对学习时间的控制并没有改变跨种族效应的大小。在第二个和第三个实验中，自定节奏和固定节奏的学习者都收到了“个性化”其他种族面孔的指示。个性化指示使自定节奏的学习者将更多学习时间分配给其他种族面孔，但这并没有显著减小跨种族效应的大小，即使对于那些报告与其他种族有广泛接触的学习者也是如此。我们认为，人们对不同种族面孔的差异化处理以及随之而来的对其他种族面孔的记忆缺陷，并非由于学习者对其他种族面孔的策略性认知忽视。
