Cross-race effect

The tendency to recognize faces from one’s own racial group more accurately than faces from other racial groups. It reflects differences in experience, attention, and face-processing strategies rather than a fixed inability.

Perceptual expertise: Improved perceptual discrimination that develops through extensive experience with a category of objects or faces. Greater experience individuating own-group faces can sharpen their distinguishing features.
Malpass and Kravitz face-recognition study: A 1969 study demonstrating lower recognition accuracy for faces of another racial group. It established a widely cited experimental demonstration of the cross-race effect.
Eyewitness testimony: A witness’s account of events or people observed during an incident. Cross-race misidentification can undermine the reliability of face-based testimony.
Own-group bias: A broad tendency to favor or process members of one’s own social group differently from outsiders. This wider category includes biases beyond face recognition and memory.
Configural processing: Face perception that uses spatial relations among facial features as well as the features themselves. Experience can tune holistic processing to the facial variations most often encountered.
Cross-race face memory and the other-race effect: Experimental research examining memory accuracy for faces from different racial groups. These studies measure the effect directly using recognition and recall tasks.
Police lineup: A procedure in which a witness views a suspect among other people to identify a perpetrator. Lineup composition and instructions can affect the expression of cross-race recognition errors.
Other-race effect: A label commonly used for poorer recognition of faces from racial groups different from one’s own. It is near-synonymous with cross-race effect, though terminology varies across research.
Face-space model: A model in which faces are represented as points in a multidimensional space defined by their features. Recognition depends on how distinctly familiar face groups are represented in perceptual space.
Face-recognition training: Practice designed to improve the ability to distinguish and remember unfamiliar faces. Training that emphasizes individuating other-group faces can reduce recognition disparities.

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