Own-race Effect: an Attentional Blink Perspective

摘要

Own-race effect is the tendency that people can better identify members of their own race than other race. In the present study, own-race effect was studied in attentional blink (AB) paradigm. AB studies have found that the second of two targets is often poorly discriminated when presented within about 500 ms from the first target. In 2 experiments, Chinese participants were asked to identify Caucasian and Asian faces in a simplified two-target RSVP paradigm (Duncan et al., 1994) and stimuli onset asynchrony between two faces were manipulated on four levels: 0ms, 235ms, 706ms, and 1176ms. In Experiment 1, only cross-race orders were adopted: C-A (Caucasian as T1, Asian as T2) and A-C (Asian as T1, Caucasian as T2). We hypothesized that AB effect might decrease or even disappear in C-A condition because of own-race effect. Contrary to our prediction, the same amplitude of AB effects was observed in C-A and A-C conditions, although the overall accuracy for identifying own-race faces was better than other-race faces. In Experiment 2, besides cross-race orders, same-race orders (A-A and C-C) were added. AB effects were found in four race orders. Again, AB effects in C-A and A-C conditions were shown to have similar pattern and similar effect size. But the advantage of identifying own-race faces over other-race faces was absent. Analysis of the first half data revealed similar result to that of the whole data set, indicating the absence of the own-race advantage could not be due to practice effect. In sum, perception of own-race and other-race faces were studied in a simplified AB paradigm and our results suggest that own-race faces and other-race faces have no differences in competing for attentional resource considering the same pattern of AB effect observed in both experiments.