Expertise, Face Recognition & the Cerebral Hemispheres

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): What is it about the faces of people from other races that make them so difficult to remember? The own-race bias (ORB) in recognition memory has been shown in a number of empirical studies (Meissner and Brigham, 2001). However, there is no clear understanding of the cognitive processes that drive this effect. Early perceptual processing of faces has been shown to activate regions of the ventral temporal cortex bilaterally (Kanwisher et al., 1997), but predominantly in the right hemisphere. This region has latterly been argued to support not face recognition per se, but expert object recognition (Gauthier et al., 2003; Gauthier et al., 2000). Since experience of, or 'contact' with, other races has been suggested as an important factor in the ORB, one might predict a right hemisphere locus to the own-race bias in memory Kuskowski & Pardo, 1999). However, a recent neuroimaging study showed that in fact it was left hemisphere ventral temporal activation that correlated with subsequent recognition accuracy and the ORB. In order to evaluate the relative contribution of each cerebral hemisphere to the ORB the main part of this project will examine face recognition in the split-brain. We will then examine the role of visual information in the face (skin color or configural changes) in the ORB. If race is processed as a visual feature (Levin, 2000) which leads to categorical (and stereotypic - Blair et al., 2002) processing of the face, we can ask what aspects of the face trigger this type of processing? The specific contribution of elements such as skin color and configural properties of cross-race faces to the ORB will be examined. Finally, we will explore the effects of dual-task interference on own- and cross-race face recognition in working memory. If expertise serves to increase capacity in working memory (Ericsson and Kintsch, 1995) then dual-task interference should have little impact on own-race face recognition (Turk, 2001 ), but should impair memory for cross-race faces. This project seeks to evaluate the relative contribution of the two cerebral hemispheres to the ORB and by implication, the role of expertise or familiarity with face types as the driving force behind the own-race bias in working memory.