Recognition on Other-Race Faces Could Be Worse Or Better: Years of Stay in Foreign Countries Modulates the Other-Race Effect

Studies have shown that life experience is important in the identification of faces of one's and other's races. The latter is known as the other-race effect (ORE). In our previous report (Wang & Kung, 2010 APCV), mimicking the published recognition memory paradigm (Golby et al., 2001 Nature Neuroscience), we found that activation in the left middle fusiform gyrus (l-mFG), along with other areas of interest, including bilateral parahippocampal and inferior frontal, right insular, medial frontal, etc, correlated with subject's years of stay in Asia, though behaviorally no clear concomitant effect of ORE was found. In the present behavioral study, with more face items to remember and to test, we find clearer ORE with Caucasians who are within 1-year of stay, and gradually toward other-race advantage, or better recognition memory for Chinese faces than for own-race Caucasian faces, with more years of stay in Taiwan. This not only indicates that ORE could be observed both in behavior and in their neural substrates, but shows again the influence of life experience upon one's face recognition ability. Attempts to combine a behaviorally established paradigm in the fMRI setting are also underway.