Modeling the Other-race Advantage with PCA
AfmZakaria Haque, Garrison W. Cottrell · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2005
The Other-race effect (ORE) refers to the well-known phenomenon of people being less accurate in recognizing faces of a different race.One popular hypothesis is that we learn to use face-features that are optimal for individuating faces of our own race; thus reducing the recognition accuracy for faces of a different race.However this hypothesis has not been able to explain some advantages other-race faces have in certain tasks.For example, some recent experiments showed that in a visual search task other-race faces are found faster than same race faces when the subjects show the ORE.A race based feature selection hypothesis where deviation from the familiar race is treated as an explicit part of the encoding has been proposed to explain this other-race advantage.In this paper, we argue that the other-race advantage can be explained without this assumption.We present the results from our simulations that suggest that the other-race advantage is an inherent characteristic of an optimal feature selection model.