Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Br J Psychol. 2023 May;114 Suppl 1:213-229. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12592. Epub 2022 Aug 26.
Faces are visual stimuli that convey rich social information. Previous experiments found better recognition for faces that were evaluated based on their social traits than on their perceptual features during encoding. Here, we ask whether this social-encoding benefit in face recognition is also found for categories of faces that we have no previous social experience with, such as other-race faces. To answer this question, we first explored whether social and perceptual evaluations for other-race faces are consistent and valid. We then asked whether social evaluations during encoding improve recognition for other-race faces. Results show that social and perceptual evaluations of own- and other-race faces were valid. We also found high agreement in social and perceptual evaluations across individuals from different races. This indicates that evaluations of other-race faces are not random but meaningful. Furthermore, we found that social evaluations facilitated face recognition regardless of race, demonstrating a social-encoding benefit for both own- and other-race faces. Our findings highlight the role of social information in face recognition and show how it can be used to improve recognition of categories of faces that are hard to recognize due to lack of experience with them.
面孔是传达丰富社会信息的视觉刺激物。先前的实验发现，在编码过程中，基于社会特征而不是感知特征对面孔进行评价时，人们对面孔的识别能力更好。在这里，我们想知道这种在面孔识别中的社会编码优势是否也适用于我们没有先前社会经验的面孔类别，例如异族面孔。为了回答这个问题，我们首先探索了对异族面孔的社会和感知评价是否一致和有效。然后，我们询问了编码过程中的社会评价是否会提高对异族面孔的识别能力。结果表明，对自己和异族面孔的社会和感知评价是有效的。我们还发现，不同种族的个体之间的社会和感知评价具有很高的一致性。这表明对异族面孔的评价不是随机的，而是有意义的。此外，我们发现，社会评价促进了面孔识别，而与种族无关，这表明对自己和异族面孔都存在社会编码优势。我们的研究结果强调了社会信息在面孔识别中的作用，并展示了如何利用它来提高对由于缺乏经验而难以识别的面孔类别的识别能力。
