Award Date

12-15-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Committee Member

Jennifer Rennels

Second Committee Member

Erin Hannon

Third Committee Member

Rachael Robnett

Fourth Committee Member

Alain Bengochea

Number of Pages

100

Abstract

The other-race effect is a phenomenon in which individuals are better able to recognize individuals of their own race than individuals of another race. These effects begin to develop during the first year of life and may be attenuated by intergroup contact. Limited research in the language domain has suggested that multilingualism may result in easier learning of non-native speech contrasts, so it is of interest whether early experience with racially diverse faces may result in more easily learning to recognize unfamiliar race faces. We conducted two studies to examine the effects of early diverse experience with faces on recognition ability and racial bias in childhood and adulthood. Participants provided information about the racial diversity of their caregivers during the first year of life as well as the racial diversity of their current social groups. Then, participants completed a series of four face recognition tasks with familiar and unfamiliar race faces. Participants also completed a pre- and post-test measure of their explicit bias toward familiar and unfamiliar race groups. Results suggested that adults and children showed relatively equal recognition accuracy with familiar and unfamiliar race faces, regardless of diverse versus homogeneous social experiences. Additionally, explicit bias did not change between pre-test and post-test. For children, greater diversity of social experiences was related to greater change in explicit bias. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Further research is needed to examine the relation between racially diverse social experiences, face recognition ability, and racial biases.

Keywords

Face Recognition

Disciplines

Cognitive Psychology | Psychology | Social Psychology

File Format

PDF

File Size

967 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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