London, Sep 22 (Inditop.com) Scientists have ample evidence that individuals use a variety of cues to spot family resemblances. People can also detect resemblances in families other than their own, a new study suggests.
The study reveals that a person’s success in doing so is the same, whether or not those families are the same race as themselves.
French and Senegalese participants were asked to match photos of parents with photos of their children. Both groups were able to detect kinship with the same rate of success, whether they were looking at French parents and children or Senegalese parents and children.
The amount of exposure – i.e. how much or how little contact participants had with members of the other race – had no effect on the participants’ ability to correctly match parents with their children.
The researchers, who are affiliated with France’s University of Montpelier and Japan’s Nagoya Institute of Technology and Okinawa University, explained that “the importance of exposure for recognising faces is supported by a large number of studies showing an “other-race effect”.
It is defined as a greater capacity to recognise faces of one’s own cultural group as compared to faces from other cultural groups.
Lead investigator Alexandra Alvergne said: “Our results suggest that exposure has a limited role in the ability to process facial resemblance in others, which contrasts with the way our brains process facial recognition.”
The study was published in the Journal of Vision.
