Humans are better at recognising faces from their own vs. another ethnic background. Socio-cognitive theories of this own-race bias (ORB) propose that reduced recognition of other-race faces results from less motivation to attend to individuating information during encoding. Accordingly, individuation instructions that explain the phenomenon and instruct participants to attend to other-race faces during learning attenuate or eliminate the ORB. However, it is still unclear how exactly such instructions affect other-race face processing. We addressed this question by investigating encoding-related event-related brain potentials, contrasting neural activity of subsequently remembered and forgotten items (Dm effects). In line with socio-cognitive accounts, individuation instructions reduced the ORB. Critically, instructions increased Dm effects for other-race faces, suggesting that more processing resources were allocated to these faces during encoding. Thus, compensating for reduced experience with other-race faces is possible to some extent, but additional resources are needed to decrease difficulties resulting from a lack of perceptual expertise.

۱٫ Introduction

Face recognition is crucial to our social interactions, and we are remarkably good at it. However, not all faces are recognised equally well. One of the most widely researched phenomena in the face memory literature is the so-called own-race bias (ORB, or other-race effect)1 , the well-documented finding that people more accurately remember faces of their own ethnic group compared to faces of another ethnicity (for a review, see Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Although these difficulties with other-race face recognition can pose substantial challenges for applied contexts, such as passport control and eyewitness testimony, the exact mechanisms underlying the ORB remain an issue of debate. Particularly relevant for the present study, it has been suggested that the ORB results from a lack of motivation to individuate other-race faces and from a failure to attend to individuating information in these faces (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010). Accordingly, an explicit instruction to individuate other-race faces has been reported to reduce or even eliminate the effect (e.g., Hugenberg, Miller, & Claypool, 2007). In the present study, we examined the extent to which individuation instructions modulate neural correlates of the ORB. Importantly, previous purely behavioural work has focused exclusively on the effect of giving individuation instructions during learning on memory performance at test, thus providing only indirect evidence of an encoding-based mechanism underlying the effect. Here, we directly investigated whether individuation instructions modulate encoding-related neural processes, and whether they do so selectively for other-race faces.