AN OTHER-RACE EFFECT FOR CATEGORIZING FACES BY SEX

It is well-known that people recognize faces of their own race more ac curately than faces of other races - a phenomenon often referred to as the 'other-race effect'. Using brief presentations of faces, we show a similar effect for the task of discriminating the sex of a face. Spe cifically, Caucasian observers discriminated male and female Caucasian faces more accurately/efficiently than did Oriental((1)) observers, a nd Oriental observers discriminated male and female Japanese faces mor e accurately/efficiently than did Caucasian observers. This result ind icates that, under suboptimal viewing conditions, the identification o f even the most salient of facial characteristics - face sex - is impa ired for other-race faces. This finding suggests, also, that the natur e and diversity of our experience with faces may affect not only the q uality of the face representation for later access by recognition proc esses, but also the efficiency of a perceptual discrimination process. Intriguingly, too, we found that female observers, for both races tes ted, were considerably more accurate at the sex classification task th an were male observers.